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What about the Artistic License?
Swordfish asks: "Despite the avid discussion of the merits and vulnerabilities of the GNU lincense, almost no one discusses the Perl Artistic License
in slashdot. Why is there so little discussion of the Artistic License? It seems to me that the GNU License allows forking, but all forks must be free. The Artistic License seem to allow commercial, closed-source forks. But if preventing forks is important, GPL doesn't seem to stop it. So why not just use the Artistic License? Then the authors can some day make money out of a commercial fork if they need to pay the bills!"
It's also true that there is not much discussion of the BSD-style-licenses in here - I think that perhaps the /. crowd is a bit closed-minded about other licenses. Not everything worth using comes under a GNU license. The artistic license, as well as other licenses, have their uses. The GPL-style licenses are not applicable to all situations. Even the Sun Community Source license has its place.
Visit
The whole point of a movement be it communism, christianity, or that of jimmy's secret club is to have a world view which is compatable. Spies wear black suits and most people use the GNU/GPL.
More seriously I think that it will allow all changes to be free regardless of forking thus allowing all development to contribute to the whole. This is a model which supports project centric thinking versus developer centric or corporate centric thinking.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I think one reason may be that Larry Wall (and the Perl community in general) don't seem to focus on the license. The FSF has an ethical/political agenda that their license encourages, so they have to advertise it. It also happens that licensing ends up being on of the points in the BSD flame wars.
:)
If asked about the merits of Artistic License, Larry would probably just tell you that there's more than one way to do it
Dana
The GPL allows forking, but it also implicitly prevents it, because any forks must also be released under the GPL. If the new features in the forked version are better than the original, there's nothing preventing the author of the original version from stealing those changes an integrating them back into his version. Meanwhile, he's been doing development, so now he has his changes PLUS the other guy's changes, and he comes out on top.
To answer your other question about being able to create a commercial, closed source version of the authors need to pay the bills: the GPL allows this as well (as does any other license) The original author of the program retains the copyright to the code and can re-release it at any time under any license he wants. What the GPL prevents is OTHER people stealing GPL'ed code and selling it as a commercial, closed source program. (this doesn't, however, prevent other people from selling it as a commercial, Open Source product)
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
As I read it, someone can take my program and modify it and choose how he wishes to release his modifications. He can make them available under the same license. He can make them available only in binary form.
What he cannot do (under the license) is to distribute his 'non-standard version' (my program WITH his changes) in binary only form without also including my 'standard version' and the copyrights and disclaimers. It's like a mixture of the BSD (you can do anything you want with it, even make it commercial and secret) and GPL (you can do anything you want with it as long as you allow anyone else the same right with regard to your own modifications). It seems to allow commercial usage while still crediting me for my own work.
There are places where it's more appropriate than others, of course, especially for Perl middleware, where someone is likely to grab a bunch of components and modify them slightly to fit a particular task.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
...so as I was daydreaming at my desk one day in the large, evil, multi-megacorp I work for, I was considering ways that Microsoft, or some other "interested party", might pervert Linux to its own ends. A comment I had heard some little time previously came to mind, likening Windows to a "booster stage" of a rocket that could now safely be discarded that Microsoft had acchieved dominance in applications programming.
I thought to myself, how could Microsoft parasitize the Linux hype in the popular media, and at the same time destroy the organized movement against it? The answer struck me: port IE to Linux, close the source, throw on a few bells, and sell an MS distro. Consumers leery of a new OS would prefer the MS-sanctioned copy, and a port of IE would allow gradual porting of the MS Office APIs and apps.
The only pitfall is the "viral" property of the GPL, under which much (all?) of Linux's code is licensed. Microsoft naturally would not undetake a port of its cash cows, or even IE, if that entailed opening their source. Despite criticisms from men like Tom Christiansen, it seems evident to me that the viral GPL is serving to protect open source "while we sleep" in ways many of us never imagine.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
But if preventing forks is important, GPL doesn't seem to stop it. So why not just use the Artistic License? Then the authors can some day make money out of a commercial fork if they need to pay the bills!"
The author of GPL code is not subject to GPL requirements, so I'm confused where you're going with this. If an author--like Alladin of Ghostscript--wishes to sell non-GPL licensed copies of his software, there's nothing preventing him, except the degree of code that hasn't had ownership signed over to him.
Small patches can be presumed to have ownership signed(though it really should be explictly stated), and large ones will end up getting a shared-ownership scenario, one way or another. But the GPL just doesn't do anything to stop commercial forks if the author needs to pay the bills!
Honestly, people genuinely don't realize how much work has gone into closing loopholes with the GPL. No matter how esoteric each clause seems, there really are good reasons for them to be there. The problem lies in the fact that overly simple licenses--of which I'm not necessarily saying the Artistic License is one of--have just as much potential for being Gotcha Source as the most complex, overwrought, and landmined license that you can find.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I think that people don't discuss the artistic license because it isn't ideologically motivated. The Artistic license strikes me as entirely pragmatic, allowing people to modify the work in question so long as they distinguish between their version and the standard version or make their modifications available. This discourages philosophical flamewars - not many people can argue with a pragmatic license, especially one which is so strongly concerned with rights of authorship and proper attribution.
The point of the GPL is not to discourage forks. So far as I know, and so far as I've read and reread, the point of the GPL is to encourage forks and code reuse. In other words, they have almost totally opposite goals. The Artistic license doesn't even touch on code reuse, which speaks volumes.
GPL authors can still make money ("to pay the bills") by rereleasing under an alternative, proprietary license. I'm not sure if that's possible under the Artistic license - for that matter, I don't think that that's necessary under the artistic license. Which one has the potential to be more profitable is up for argument, of course.
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Ok, I admit this is offtopic, however, this is the closest story I can think of that's come up recently....
.000000001 per record returned... something like that.
Recently there has been lot of discussion of databases, and who owns them. The US either is considering or passed a law saying a Database(and info contained there-in) is owned by the creating person/company. [I honestly can't remember.]
At anyrate, this got me thinking of a the (possible) need for DGPL. Basically the same as the LGPL, but adding that the database host (i.e. the owner of the server hosting the specific instance of the db) can put restrictions on access allowing them to offset the cost of hosting the machine (administration, i'net connection, etc.). Examples of acceptable restrictions would be 1) any program accessing this database must display the advert. provided, 2) a cost of
Is there a lic. that allows this kind of thing, or should I be working on one?
I'm aware this would be hard to enforce, but I think it has some potential...
[Yes, this directly related to something I'm currently working on....and no, I don't want to give out specifics, I will talk in generalities though...]
Myddrin
It seems like the right to fork, far from being a liability of the GPL, is a signifigant strength. Its a way to get a bunch of random people to work very hard to reconcile their visions of what a system should be like- nobody wants a code fork, so people try very hard to work together.
On the other hand, when visions are really irreconciliable, the option to fork can be a good thing- Lots of people like Xemacs, and lots of other people like emacs classic, and this code fork let those people do there thing where it was needed. And both emaxen are open source. Everybody still wins.
With the Artistic license things seem to become much more difficult. A lot more responsibility rests with the community- If MegaCorp markets 'MegaPerl', complete with non-standard name & clear documentation of differences, the perl community has to catch up, and quick. Especially when MegaCorp starts introducing Value Adding Incompatabilities® That nobody else gets to see... If one fork of emacs dies tomorrow nobody loses. If perl dies and MegaPerl continues everyone does.
The way to deal with this is aggressive development and promotion. Perl has this, thanks to an amazing community with great leadership. Ad as long as that keeps up, and new features keep getting added to the system, MegaPerl is doomed to failure. But they live in a much more dangerous place than their GPL'd bretheren.
Its the Ideology(tm)!
The GPL was designed as a defense against commercial software, it seems. Its one of these 'property is theft' things - anyone care to explain what that means?
The GPL basically turns the traditional license on its head - it protects the users instead of the producers. So long as they don't break the license, there is nothing to stop anyone that gets hold of something GPLd from doing something the author doesn't like. Because it provides some safety for users, it is attractive to developers who want to gain users.
Personally I like the idea behind the BSD license - that it promotes the use of quality code by allowing anyone to borrow bits for use in anything, regardless of the next license, so long as it is acreditted. I think the GPL's political nature will ultimately prevent its apparent greatest ambition - to move to a world where everything is GPLed. It works fine for hobby projects, labour of love stuff, like Linux. But at the same time it excludes the larger part of the software producing world - industry - from benefitting unless they are prepared to change their whole business model to the one advocated by RMS and his wandering carrier bags. But it is doing us a great service by bring the whole open source thing back into relatively common use, like it was when Unix was young.
Thanks for asking the question. I will make the effort to look at the Artistic license and see if I can learn from it. It sounds like a fair solution.
Nothing in the GPL prohibits authors from releasing commercial versions of their own software -- or closed-source versions either.
In fact, you can't write a license that limits your rights as the author; the GPL is based on copyright law, which says that authors can do anything, but other users have to do what the author says (thus the "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the software" note in the GPL).
So you're free to release your software under as many different licenses as you want, closed and/or open. IIRC, perl itself is a good example of this -- it's available under both the GPL and the Artistic License, so people who want to incorporate it into GPLed projects can do so, while people who need more flexibility have that option as well.
Some of the confusion may arise because if you want your program to become part of the GNU project (as distinct from part of the larger category of "software distrubuted under the GNU GPL") you have to assign your copyright to the Free Software Foundation (give the software to them, in other words). By doing that you relinquish your rights as author and can no longer release closed-source versions.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
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Xenu loves you!
GPL allows forks, indeed ENCOURAGES forks, in many ways, but with all forks free and open (UNLESS the code is significantly re-written, and the amount of GPLed code used is small). This works in the same way as evolution. If something has an advantage, it'll thrive. If it doesn't, it'll die. This leads to the digital equivalent of bio-diversity (electro-diversity?), with a large proliferation of specialised tools, all performing similar, but usefully different, functions.
The BSD licence makes some fundamental assumptions IMHO - that well-designed and well-maintained programs fork rarely and that evolutionary forces are not as significant in programming as market forces (although both exist). This leads to having a relatively small number of variants, all performing a wide range of functions and all very similar (if not identical).
Each of these has a place. The GPL is -not- useful for producing "office" applications, IMHO, because the needs are too structured. There's no room for evolution to take place. Also, each application has to do too many things, and there's little room for diversity. The BSD licence is -ideal- for this kind of application, for the very same reasons.
On the other hand, something like speech synthesis or speech recognition, search engines, toolkits, etc, would be horrible to try under a BSD licence. The drive to fragment, and the fact that any of those fragments can close & become commercial, would rip the project apart, before long. The GPL, though, is perfect for this, encouraging and promoting the very things that would destroy the work, under a BSD licence.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
- This source code is free.
Of course, this leaves the restrictions and legal remedies somewhat unclear, but I think the license's brevity and artistic merit (cough) make up for that.One flower becomes many.
Make your code free too.
The AL certainly doesn't purport to stop you from adding your own extensions. And if you do that, it certainly doesn't tell you under what conditions you can or cannot distribute or charge for this work, nor does it say anything about whether you must provide source for your own work. (Actually, it says that it doesn't say that. :-) That would be wicked because it would mean trying to exert control over some other software besides the original; that is, stuff that whoever issued the licence didn't themself write. I don't even know whether it's legal, but it's certainly not programmer-friendly.
As I dimly understand these matters, Larry just doesn't want you to write something and then pretend that it was Larry who really wrote it. I don't blame him, and I'd be surprised if anybody did. I doubt you'd want somebody other than a legitimate owner of that name putting "written by [your name here]" all over their own software.
fraud, not about restricting anybody's freedom. I hardly see these two matters as alternate faces of the same issue, but perhaps some people do.
If you intend to make your software as useful as it can be to as many people as you can, then you should make it free software. Which is a terrible word, because of word games from the FSF. I mean free as in "gift". As in "free of restrictions" or as in "no strings attached". There are plenty of licences out there that do this. Short licences are better than long ones. The best license is "do as thou wilt".
Here's one that's been floating around:
And here's another:As you see, a free licence is simple, to the point, and generous. It is not an insidious imposition of your person moral choices upon others. If you decide their choices for them a priori, they can make no moral decision. There is no goodness in being automata. You must let people choose for themselves.
Some people prefer to install poison-pills in their licences. Usually, this poison pill is about using the software to make money with. Sleepycat Software has that, the GPL has that, and so do lots of others. I suppose some selfish people have good reasons for this, but let's not be pretending that software with a poison-pill in it is somehow "free", or that it does the most good. It doesn't. A selfish poison pill tries to make sure that the original authors' socio-economic-political dogma gets spread through the world at the cost of helping fewer people. "Use" licences like this hamper code reuse and hurt programmers. A gift, on the other hand, comes without a price tag on it.
Every author has to make up their own mind here. I personally prefer software freely given away--without restrictions, without legislated morality, without poison pills, without any agenda beyond trying to help to make the world a better place. The AL seems to do a good job at that.
Try, please, to remember what the greatest gift of all is. If you know what it is and why, then you'll understand. If you do not, then I'm not sure I can convince you. But the answer is charity.
The problem with the BSD and the Artistic for me is that I'm not interested in facilitating someone else's proprietary software without getting something back from them - I am only interested in sharing with people who give me the same rights that I give them. I can still make my own proprietary software with my own work, because I hold the copyright and can issue my work with any number of licenses. If I want to use someone else's work in proprietary software, I can buy a license from them, just as I can sell a license to other people who want to make proprietary use of my work. This is hardly anti-commercial. In fact, you could say that the GPL is neutral regarding proprietary work, because it allows you to buy and sell separate commercial licenses and do pretty much what you'd do with conventional software licensing if you wish.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
One of the great license myths is that the GPL prevents authors from making money and less restrictive licenses permit it. My experience is exactly the opposite. I wrote a GPL'd program which a big corporation wanted to use part of in a commercial product, which they did not want to GPL. They asked for a special license which I granted for a nice fee. If I had used the Artistic or BSD licenses, I would never have heard from them and never even known they used my code.
This is a big advantage of the GPL which is not often mentioned in these discussions.
I don't see what your problem is with this situation. If programmer A wants to use the work of B, C, D etc. in a commercial product then of course he needs their permission. If he doesn't get it, then he has to make do without their help.
It's hardly a case of "pollution". If I were programmer B, I'd be highly ticked off if someone took my work on any GPL project and used it in their own proprietary project. I'd have every right to complain.
Basically, open source software should be seen as a donation to the community. Making it proprietary again is like stealing out of charity boxes. If you want to make money off distributing, consulting and support then that's just fine. But the software must stay free.
For goodness sake, this is the whole *point* of the GPL. Software for the good of all, payment for the work you do rather than as a royalty for some fictitious property right. If you don't like this idea, then don't use the GPL, but then don't go expecting freebies from the open source community either.
I used to release my works under the AL, but have switched to the BSD. But I still have a warm spot in my heart for the AL nonetheless.
In order to understand the Artistic License, you first have to understand where it comes from. The AL first arrived on the scene with Perl. Perl, as you are aware, is a multi-disciplinary language. The hallmarks of Perl hackers are hubris, laziness and impatience. There is more than one way to do anything is the Perl motto. The Artistic License reflects all of these things, as well as the linguistic legerdemain of Larry Wall's humour.
Perl was release under a dual GPL/Artistic license. Larry wanted the hacker community to embrace Perl, but understand that there was a large contingent of "GPL or Go To Hell" reactionaries within it. He also wanted it to be used by the suits, but also understood that many in the corporate world are frightened of the viral nature of copyleft. By releasing Perl under a dual license, the user could choose whatever license they wanted and no one would ever know. You could be secretly using Artistic Perl while everyone else around you thought you were using the party line GPL. Or vice versa. Talk about subversion!
Bruce Perens perenially states his dislike for the AL because he thinks it is a "sloppy" license. Bruce Perens should take some classes in linguistics. "Artistic License" has a meaning beyond the mere name of a software license.
The main gist of the Artistic License is that you can do anything you want with the software, but you must let the user know you're doing it. Thus, you can take AL's software proprietary, but the user can't be hoodwinked into thinking he's running the real stuff, and you have to let the user know where to get the real stuff if he wants it.
If none of the above makes any sense, then just visualize the Artistic License on the middle of an imaginary line stretched between the BSD and GPL licenses.
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