Perl modules (license: distributable)

[Matthias Saou]

Garrick Staples wrote :

> On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 04:18:54PM -0400, Matthew Miller alleged:
> > On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 10:39:31AM -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> > > JPO> The Mail::Sender module has the following license: "This program
> > > JPO> is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
> > > JPO> the same terms as Perl itself. There is only one aditional
> > > JPO> condition, you may NOT use this module for SPAMing! NEVER! (see
> > > JPO> http://spam.abuse.net/ for definition)"
> > > Nice and contradictory; perl is GPL (and Artistic, of course) and the
> > > GPL prevents adding restrictions.  The module shouldn't have been
> > > included.
> > 
> > Nothing prevents you from licensing your code as "GPL + additional
> > restrictions". You just can't add additional restrictions to code that was
> > licensed _to you_ under the GPL. And of course, any such additional
> > restrictions make the result not GPL-compatible.
> 
> Not that I disagree with you, but that limit on usage, even for
> spamming, still violates the FSF free software definition.
> 
> "The freedom to run the program, for any purpose"
> 
> "any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer
> system, for any kind of overall job"

Yeah, problematic situation. The worst part is : Do you really think
spammers would even care?

Matthias

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