Another pass at redrafting the Artistic License

[Ben Tilly]

David Johnson wrote:
>
>On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Ben Tilly wrote:
> > (To the folks on the license-discuss list.)  As you may know,
> > Perl is currently undergoing a rewrite.  As part of this
> > rewrite licensing is being reviewed, and we are attempting
> > to come up with an Artistic License that is (*ahem*) on
> > somewhat better grounds than the current one.  This is my
> > current attempt but IANAL and I desperately need some legal
> > types who are willing to comment on whether this will hold
> > water, whether it will meet the OSD, etc.
>
>This is a vastly different license than the old version. So I have to
>ask, why the *huge* change? Another question is why there is a separate
>agreement?

The polite description for why to consider a huge change is
that the current license is Swiss cheese.  Perl has basically
survived on the fact that everyone loves Larry Wall, Larry
would never sue anyone, no other core developer would either,
and Perl hackers don't mind ignoring lawyers.

Anyone who wishes to read the license carefully can figure
out for themselves that there are problems.  I got bored
after a while with counting ways to break, mutilate, and
generally abuse the license.  It gave TIMTOWTDI new and
unhappy meanings.  Grabbing copies of the Artistic License
out of different versions of Perl is another fun exercise.
It seems to sprout additions whenever someone wants to do
something Larry hadn't thought of allowing.  Certainly
anyone who says, *THE* Artistic License hasn't actually
looked carefully...

Given that Perl is undergoing a rewrite and this is going to
be the best chance for fixing the situation for, oh, at least
a decade, (the time between rewrites grows exponentially with
releases) a few people who buck the trend and care think it
might be a good idea to propose a solution to this...

Does that answer why I might want to propose a major rewrite?



Now why the structure?  Well I am borrowing from the GPL the
idea of having a license which is also used as a contract
agreement.  (Read section 5.)  My understanding is that that
allows you to have provisions enforcable under contract law,
which allows you to enforce lots of things that copyright
law won't.

It is somewhat behind, but take a look at

http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-licenses%40perl.org/maillist.html

for some of the discussions leading up to this.  Scroll to the
bottom and start working your way up.  A few good stopping
places:

http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-licenses%40perl.org/msg00019.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-licenses%40perl.org/msg00024.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-licenses%40perl.org/msg00032.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-licenses%40perl.org/msg00074.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-licenses%40perl.org/msg00079.html
  (Note the fact that the Artistic License may cease to be
  an open source license.  Oops.)
http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-licenses%40perl.org/msg00084.html

Cheers,
Ben
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.