Re: Authorship, Licensing, Copyright...

[Mike808 <mi...@ne...>]

Bron Gondwana wrote:
> There's very much two schools of thought here - but once we start splitting
> functionality into separate files, we'll need to either put all the docs
> in one or do messy include stuff (I'm not sure how POD handles that)

I very much believe that each separate source file should stand alone.
That means intact with embedded copyright/ownership/licensing/version
info. That also means included POD. No module should be distributed 
without POD. That doesn't mean that SomeModule.pm can't have a 
SomeModule.pod to go along with it. Both should carry copyright 
and licensing info within, the POD should have it both source-visible
and perldoc visible.

This is precisely to prevent 'out-of-context' issues due to our
omission to exert these claims and rights. BTW, we are all in the 
good ole US of A, right? (Besides Geert and Egon, I know).

Then if we need a cookbook or tutorial or overall POD doc, then we 
just write something like a 'XSLT-cookbook.pm' or XSLT-tutorial.pm' 
that only contains POD, so the 'disjoint docset' isn't an issue.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'messy include stuff'. I see nothing
wrong with a 'SEE ALSO' section and a reference to the other PODs.
This would be consistent with CORE Perl perldocs and pretty much all
CPAN modules.

On the licensing, I'm fine with Geert and Egon's (and mine)
use of 'same terms as Perl itself' message.
e.g.
# This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.


As for copyright, well, technically, if I write it, I own the
copyright unless I explicitly transfer it to someone/thing else.
Hence a clear assignment of copyright to contributed work, like
the Apache group does. I'll see if I can borrow some relevant
text that isn't too lengthy and complicated.

I've got some major changes to the 1.8.6.4 on the 
cpan-0_2x-maint tree. I know there's a .5 I need to merge.

I found some missing '=' assignments buried in the code. Weird.
Fixed. e.g. my $var some_function($a,$b,$c); # Missing '='???

Also, I noticed some speedups with our hash accesses that we
were wasting time doing copy-on-write operations. NOT Fixed.
Noted with a comment.

Also, did some speedups by moving indirect references to lexicals.
I'm about halfway through the code now.

Mike.