Another pass at redrafting the Artistic License

[David Johnson]

On Sat, 16 Sep 2000, Ben Tilly wrote:

> >My view of "proper" OSS and FS licenses is that they grant additional
> >permissions to the user beyond those offered by copyright, but take
> >away none of the rights of the user that copyright allows. You can give
> >but you can't take away.
> 
> Then this clearly is not a "proper" FS license.  Basically it
> says, "If you want to play in our sandbox, you have to follow
> Larry's rules.  If you just want to play with our toys, go
> ahead as long as you don't mess with our sandbox."

Perhaps I didn't clarify myself. I find it perfectly acceptable for a
permission to have conditions. IANAL though, and I could be
completely off base here. Basically, one can say "you have permission to
play in our sandbox so long as you follow our rules, but if you don't
follow our rules then the law says that you can't play in other people's
sandboxes anyway." 

A license along the lines of "you can do x, y and x provided
that you also do 1, 2 and 3" may technically be a contract, but it
doesn't require contract law for enforcement.

One problem with contract/agreement "based" licenses is what happens
if someone doesn't agree? If you are unable to protect the software
with copyright, then you have no recourse if someone disagrees with the
contract. I think the GPL got it right when it said "These actions are
prohibited by law [copyright] if you do not accept this License". 

> There are two items that do not fall under copyright law in
> there.  The first is that you really want something somewhere
> saying that, "Yes, all developers really agreed to our
> ground-rules."  Doesn't have to be here, I just think it is
> a convenient place to put it and avoid paperwork. 

Okay, fair enough...

-- 
David Johnson
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