Re: Integration of gettext in Perl

[Guido Flohr]

Hi,

I think it's best to reply to my own mail.

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 03:21:17PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Guido Flohr <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > The module will be available as free (GPL and/or Artistic) software.
                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > Please do not publish the above URL, the home address of the package
> > will be on the CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/).

My statement "GPL and/or Artistic" was a shortcut for:

        This is free software.  It may be distributed either 
        under the terms of the Artistic License or at your
        choice the GNU General Public License.

Such a copyright statement is very common for Perl modules. The 
primary source for free Perl modules, the CPAN is full of it.
If there is anything wrong with it, the CPAN should be shut down
immediately.

And: The software is my own work, and I consider it part of my
personal freedom whether and how I make it publicly available.

Just in case: libintl (the thing that I do not use in my software,
but that I have re-implemented in Perl from scratch) is not GPL
but LPGL code.  See the item "Dependencies over the GPL or LGPL"
in node "Discussions, Organization, Trans Intro 1, Translators"
in gettext.texi from gettext 0.11.4.

Now that it should be clear, that this discussion is merely 
academical, I can point out what I think about the topic. What I
have done is: I have written a bunch of ASCII text files that,
if you happen to write another ASCII text file yourself and
include a line like "use Locale::Messages;" , and if
you decide to let it execute by a program that is capable of
interpreting Perl 5 scripts, and if this program happens to 
be able to dynamically load shared libraries, and if you happen
to install another free Perl module by the name of "Locale::gettext"
(there may be one available on the CPAN), then your Perl interpreter
may decide to look for libintl on your system, and dynamically link
and execute this library because the code in the other Perl module
"Locale::gettext" may have instructed it to do so.  But I have 
never written a Perl module by the name of "Locale::gettext" and
I am not responsible for the one that has been written, and I am
not responsible for your system, for the libraries that you have
installed or not.  And I would not accept any stipulations from the
fact that I have published a bunch of ASCII text files in the
first place.

But even if I had written a non-free proprietary software in
C that "links into" a GPL library like readline: IMHO, using
or writing a library is nothing but fulfilling a protocol and
I seriously doubt that by implementing one side of a protocol
you can impose any restrictions on implementing the other side.
I seriously doubt that both from an ethical and a legal point
of view.  The author of GNU readline doesn't have a claim
on the name "libreadline.so" and the vendor of a proprietary
software would only have to document the interface of the 
readline library and demand an implementation of that interface
from his customers.  Whether the customer decides to pick the
free GNU implementation from the internet and uses this, is not
the software vendor's problem.  The customer has to arrange
that with the author of the free readline implementation.

The fact that there is seemingly only one implementation of
the readline interface available cannot make a change here.
Putting a restriction on the usage of the interface that
readline provides is in my opinion ethically and legally untenable
as it implies the idea that nobody else would be allowed to
write an alternative implementation of the readline interface
under different terms and conditions of usage.  It it were really
possible to prevent other people from realizing an abstract
idea, free software packages like Mesa, Samba, GNU gettext (!),
or even Linux could all be illegal, and so-called software
patents would all be just fine.

Providing a "missing link" and then quickly claiming an eternal
and exclusive property on usage of the idea /behind/ that link
is, from my point of view, dishonest and immoral.  Besides,
if I wrote a shared library and put the (source!) code under
the GPL, at least over here in Germany, I would not even try
to sue a software vendor for selling a product that links against
my library (or an alternative future implementation) because
I would see no chance at all for my case.  Furthermore, I would
not want to do so, because it was actually my intention to enable
other people using my library, and not to prevent them from doing
so.  I see my intellectual property and my achievement in the 
source code I have written and not in the representation as
bits in some computer's virtual memory.  And if I invented the saw,
I could not charge anybody for growing trees.

Guido
-- 
Imperia AG, Development
Leyboldstr. 10 - D-50354 Hürth - http://www.imperia.de/

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