Another pass at redrafting the Artistic License

[Ben Tilly]

David Johnson wrote:
>
>On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Ben Tilly wrote:
>
[...]
> > Does that answer why I might want to propose a major rewrite?
>
>Yes it does. If it's broke fix it, but it seems as if your trading in
>the broken hunk for a completely different model :-)

I am.  It is a model based on the stated feelings of core
Perl people about what they care about.  Basically it falls
under, "Don't screw us over and we'll share."

> > 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.
>
>Okay, this is my opinion, and as such I expect it to hit the bit bucket
>microseconds after delivery...

Noted.

>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."

Playing by Larry's rules means that Larry should be able to
say, "XYZ accidentally did foo.  I told them it wasn't going
to be a big deal. but their lawyers want to know if I can
really say that.  Can I?"  He shouldn't have to track down
every last copyright holder, get their attention, and say,
"Can I say this?"

You can't do that unless your contributers have all agreed in
advance that you can.  Most certainly copyright law by itself
won't cut it.

If a license follows this guideline, then
>there is nothing that cannot be enforced by copyright law.  IANAL, but
>it seems that if someone went against the terms of a copyright-based
>license, they would be in violation of copyright law regardless of the
>presence of any agreement or contract.

You have a circular definition of copyright-based, it is
copyright-based if it can be defended under copyright law. :-)

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.  The other
is that you have to guarantee public source-code availability
for the Original Version and any Standard Version you create
from the Original Version.  I really don't think that you can
do that in copyright, and it is key to defending against all
sorts of neat attacks where the Original Version exists...but
is not publically available.

>Since I am of the persuasion that contracts without explicit agreement
>from both sides are onerous things, I would much prefer a list of
>permissions to a contract. Tell me what I can do, not what you will sue
>me over.

That has been tried.  The problem is that you are allowed to
do pretty much anything as long as you don't interfere with
Larry Wall's ability to define Perl how he likes, so a list
of what is allowed gets very long and you wind up missing
stuff anyways.  (One of the reasons that the AL is today in
bad shape.)

Basically the opposite of how you write a firewall.  In a
firewall you want to deny pretty much everything so you
arrange to say only what you allow.  Well in this license
you want to allow pretty much everything so you arrange to
say only what you deny.

>Okay, opinion over...
>
And noted. :-)

Cheers,
Ben
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