Uses of the Artistic License?

Ben Tilly btilly at gmail.com
Wed Jan 17 02:06:14 UTC 2007


On 1/16/07, Bob Jacobsen <rgj1927 at pacbell.net> wrote:
> Can anybody please point me to users of the Artistic License?
>
> I'm a party to a Federal lawsuit involving copyright of open-source
> code that's released under the Artistic License.  For more
> information about that, please see
> <http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html>.  The defendants have
> argued that our use of the Artistic License does not provide
> protection under copyright law, but only much more limited protection
> under contract law. Should they win this, it would be an unfortunate
> precedent.
>
> One of the things we have to file with the Court is a disclosure of
> "interested entities".  The outcome of this case may be of interest
> to any project using the Artistic License, and perhaps more generally
> to users of other licenses.  We should therefore list any projects
> using the Artistic License that we can reasonably find.  I know about
> Perl, and have included that.  (It would also be helpful to point at
> any published information on Perl usage; I'd appreciate a pointer to
> anything like that you might know about) Are there any other large
> and/or well-known projects?

Another project that comes to mind is Ruby.

But, stupid question, would it be useful to have some of the other
organizations that could be affected to react to this?  A precedent
saying that the Artistic License is unenforcible would be disasterous
for Perl (it would disallow a lot of commercial uses of Perl code),
and I'm sure I could locate the right people to get an "official Perl
response" to this situation.

Ben



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