Esteemed Monks,

Some few weeks ago I asked in Packaging GUI application. for advice on packaging a Tk based application. Naturally the three major contenders were

• perl2exe from IndigoStar here in Toronto
• PAR
• PerlAPP from the Perl Developers Kit.

Initially I called IndigoStar and spoke to Indy Singh, he was most helpful and offered whatever support would be needed should I purchase the product and had difficulty packaging my Tk based application.

I also downloaded PAR, it worked pretty well as described. But eventually I saw this text in the license conditions:

Neither this program nor the associated L<pp> program impose any licensing restrictions on files generated by their execution, in accordance with the 8th article of the Artistic License: "Aggregation of this Package with a commercial distribution is always permitted provided that the use of this Package is embedded; that is, when no overt attempt is made to make this Package's interfaces visible to the end user of the commercial distribution. Such use shall not be construed as a distribution of this Package." Therefore, you are absolutely free to place any license on the resulting executable, as long as the packed 3rd-party libraries are also available under the Artistic License.

So I passed a copy of it to our IP lawyer who responded in this fashion:

If you package a product with PAR then any modules which 'we' (the corporate we) develop can be licensed under any license terms. But if we use a third-party module, it can only be one which is licensed under the 'Artistic License' in addition to any other license it is offered under.

So, PAR was out of the question from a licensing point of view! Our applications use a proprietary module which comes from a payment processor used by two of our clients.

Sadly, the open-source alternative lost out, but what of the other two. Well, in the end I chose PerlAPP because we purchased the Komodo package from ActiveState that had the PDK included. I might have considered perl2exe except that PerlAPP is readilly available from within the Komodo IDE.

jdtoronto UPDATE After discovering that the text was not form the PAR license but from Tkpp - a GUI front end supplied in the same package our lawyers have revised their assessment of the license. See Re^2: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. for clarification.

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