[SVN] licenses, redistributing perl

[Allan Odgaard]

On Feb 19, 2005, at 18:22, Eric Hsu wrote:

> 1.  Allan notes correctly that I was using HTML::Entities, which I 
> thought was a standard library but was sadly mistaken. The easiest 
> solution was to include the library (it's 16K). [...]

What is wrong with doing the entity substitution inline instead of 
calling encode_entities?

> 2. Allan said he needed to eventually look into the license under 
> which we are contributing stuff. I would think the Perl Artistic 
> License works. He can still charge money for the editor and bundle all 
> the extra stuff for free. We all keep our copyrights and people can 
> use our work. They can even modify it if they either keep their 
> changes private, or if they make it public, then the reveal the source 
> and note the changes.  Note, I am not at all an expert on Open Source 
> licenses...

With the current situation I would think that every OSS license 
actually works, since your contributions are distributed exactly as 
they are submitted, I don't derive anything from them or wrap them up 
in “closed” source.

I could however see a potential problem if for example I decide to 
offer parser plugins (as opposed to the current declarative system) and 
base some default parsers on the syntax definitions currently in the 
repository. Then these plugins would be derivative work, so the source 
for these would need to be open for some of the OSS licenses, but 
worse, I think the GPL would also require that the source of TextMate 
be open, if it links with these parsers. The LGPL should however solve 
that problem.