Bento Poetic License

Michael St . Hippolyte mash at brooklyndigital.net
Wed May 8 18:37:13 UTC 2002


I'm curious if there are any more comments on the license I
submitted recently, the Bento Poetic License at 
http://www.bentodev.org/poetic-license.html

The original submission is in the list archive at
http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:5259:200204:kcdocpaalpbjdpllmjln

So far it received only one comment on this list, and it was a
positive one.  I'm a little hesitant though to conclude that the
license is without flaws:)

The rationale for this license in a nutshell:

Bento is a completely open, non-proprietary programming language.
The developers of Bento want to see it used as widely as possible,
and therefore want to put minimal restrictions on use, distribution
and modification of the Bento code.  However, we want to maintain
some degree of control over future development of the language
itself.  This is very similar to the rationale for the Artistic
License (as stated in its Preamble), which also happens to have
been written for an open, non-proprietary language.  So we took
the Artistic License as our starting point.  We made two main
changes to the license:

1. We removed the Artistic License's restriction against charging
money for the Bento code.  We do not see the commercialization
of Bento by others as something to be avoided.

2. We tightened the restrictions on modifying the code.  Whereas
the Artistic License allows unconditional modifications as long
as the modifications are in the public domain or obtained from
the copyright holder, the Poetic License allows unconditional
modifications when they are consistent with the language
specification (the test for consistency is defined in the
license, and is very liberal, i.e. hard to fail).

Thank you in advance for any comments, critiques or suggestions.

Michael St. Hippolyte
mash at bentodev.org
http://www.bentodev.org
   
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