RFC: "Artistic license" for Frontier scripting (repost)

bruce at perens.com bruce at perens.com
Thu Sep 23 17:06:41 UTC 1999


"Frontier" is most likely a registered trademark and your use of it in the
name of a license probably needs authorization.

If you've modified the Artistic license, you should probably not call it
"ARTISTIC" at all, so that you avoid confusion with the unmodified Artistic
license.

I consider the original Artistic license to be a somewhat "sloppy"
license in that it makes restrictions and then provides ways to trivially
circumvent them. For example, I can not sell your program separately,
but I can sell it if I aggregate it with a 5-line "hello_world.c" . There's
a bit more about that in http://perens.com/OSD.html , close to the end.

A short glance over it leads me to think that this license probably meets
the OSD. I have one question you should consider:

Are your changes significant enough that they justify the creation of yet
another license? Every time we get another license that's more confusion
regarding the conflicts between them, and it's more load on the programmer
and distribution creator who has to learn yet another license. Could you not
make life easier for everyone by using an existing, pre-certified license?

	Thanks

	Bruce



More information about the License-discuss mailing list