The idea of requiring that license terms be included for posts to Code Catacombs led me to consider a couple of personal biases:

• Programmers aren't experts on licensing, and don't want to be

  Speaking as a non-expert myself, I think many who post code at PM (both professionals and amateurs) have only limited knowledge about (or interest in) the details and implications of various licensing terms. The fact that PM is a global community makes this more difficult, because licensing in an international context is even more obscure than licensing in any one country.

  At most, folks might blithely accept and apply some brief statement that covers "use at your own risk" and "keep my name on it" (and maybe "I'm giving it away for free here, so don't pretend that you can limit or deny the ability of others to obtain and use it for free"). Often, they just don't care, and take it for granted that source code posted on PM may as well be "public domain" (whatever that means).

• The whole issue of software licensing is too complicated, and we should try to simplify things

  The PM community should do what it can to keep things simple, reasonable, and consistent with the spirit of open source development. Keeping things "safe for open source" is really pretty easy here -- this is a public web site (no real access restrictions) about a language in which source code cannot really be hidden from the end user (so far).

More often than not, I think, people post code here for the benefit of getting peer review -- e.g. before posting to CPAN or other forums where the focus is on distributing code rather than discussing how it's written. For that matter, I'd guess that with relatively few exceptions (notably PM-related code), most of the code downloads are for the sake of reviewing and sending feedback to the author.

So, if licensing terms really are felt to be required, it should be possible to include them in a way that adds little or no difficulty to the process of posting code, even for people whose native language (or legal system) is not English.

I think it would be okay, and maybe even beneficial for all concerned, to provide, at most, a small number of radio buttons in the Code Catacombs posting form, offering choices for what sort of license should be applied/linked into the post, such as:

• The default PM license (see below)
• The GNU Public License (GPL)
• The Same License As Perl Itself (if it's good enough for Larry...)
• None of the above -- poster supplies own license terms within the post

(Maybe there are one or two others that are in common use... but 5 choices is pushing the limit, and more than 6 would be too many.)

The "default PM license", if any such is necessary, ought to be as brief and simple as possible -- maybe the default case should just be "This software is being placed in the public domain by its author, who hopes that it will be useful, and that users will act in a responsible manner when circulating copies of the software in original or modified forms. Use the software at your own risk."

(Having something that applies by default could cover all the past nodes where no licensing was specified. I'm not sure about the legality or effectiveness of "updating" the choice of license terms at some later time, unless the update involves a switch to a less restrictive choice.)

Having links to the other common license documents might be educational as well as handy. Let's hope that few people will opt for writing their own licensing terms... that really would not simplify things at all.

In any event, the notion that legal actions might ensue from violations of license conditions stated on PM nodes seems quite implausible. Even the possibility that a monk might be sued for posting someone else's code as his/her own is pretty remote, since there is no financial gain to (im)poster, and probably not much in terms of tangible financial loss to the "plaintiff".

(Of course, the only "practical" reason for imposing licenses on all Code nodes is to make it easier/less worrisome for people at big companies to actually use code from PM -- that in itself is not a bad reason.)

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