discuss: Bento Poetic License (resubmission)

[Michael St . Hippolyte]

On 2002.07.25 11:46 Thatcher Ulrich wrote:
> What's wrong with the Perl Artistic License?  If the situation you
> fear has not affected Perl (or has it...), why do you think it would
> affect Bento?

The Artistic License is considered by some to be flawed (see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicense)
It seeks a measure of "artistic control" which is less precisely
defined than in the Bento Poetic License -- the Artistic License
puts restrictions on any sort of change, whereas we limit the
restrictions to a very narrow class of changes (those which
contradict the language specification).  It also restricts
commercialization of derived products, which we don't want to
do.

> Another possibility to consider: Copyright does not protect you from
> someone writing their own independent implementation, not derived from
> your code, and claiming it's Bento-compatible (regardless of whether
> it actually is).  The problem here is that your copyright license has
> no bearing on them, since they're not using your software.

That's by intention.  The true test of compatibility is whether an
implementation passes the conformance tests, which is a much tougher
standard than what we have in our license.  The restrictions in our
license are meant simply to prevent our own hard work from being turned
against us; if someone wants to create their own incompatible version
of Bento they'll have to do it from scratch.

In practice, since the grammar is covered by the license, as well as
the standard library of Bento code, a completely independent
implementation would probably have a hard time worming its way into
use in place of standard implementations.

Michael St. Hippolyte
  
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