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!"

Comments

BSD license (not offtopic)

[chandler]

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.

Re:BSD license (not offtopic)

[hankaholic]

> I think that perhaps the /. crowd is a bit closed-minded about other licenses.

While at times it seems that way, I'd rather hope that reality is somewhat different. People will sling mud at anyone and anything without really doing the research first, and some uninformed moderators seem to think that opinionated == informed.

I agree that various licenses have different merits and uses. I just won't get thrown up into the spotlight (or the "10 Hot Comments Slashbox :) for saying so.

What does open source mean to me? It means that when I started using the libsensors modules, I was able to add a temperature sensors to wmmon. When I'm unhappy with the smoothness of my mouse acceleration, I can modify gpm's two lines of acceleration code and do whatever I want with it, including examing SVGAlib to see how they chose to do it "properly". It's the little things like that.

Most of the "GPL"-shouting zealots I've seen never even take advantage of the modifiability (hope that's a word :) of open source (not Open Source - I'm not getting political here) software. It seems that most of the GPL zealots have little to contribute to the community in terms of brain, so they throw as much heart into matters as possible.

Just a thought.

-chet

Because of Larry?

[DanaL]

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

GPL and forking

[Dr. Sp0ng]

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

Sounds good to this uninformed reader

[Taurine]

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.

Bruce Perens on why to avoid the Artistic License

[Paul Crowley]

Bruce Perens has argued strongly for avoiding this license. In his article on the Open Source Definition for Open Sources, he writes:

Please see appendix XXX for the full text of the Artistic License. Although this license was originally developed for Perl, it's since been used for other software. It is, in my opinion, a sloppily-worded license, in that it makes requirements and then gives you loopholes that make it easy to bypass the requirements. Perhaps that's why almost all Artistic-license software is now dual-licensed, offering the choice of the Artistic License or the GPL.

Section 5 of the Artistic License prohibits sale of the software, yet allows an aggregate software distribution of more than one program to be sold. So, if you bundle an Artistic-licensed program with a 5-line hello-world.c, you can sell the bundle. This feature of the Artistic License was the sole cause of the "aggregate" loophole in paragraph 1 of the Open Source Definition. As use of the Artistic License wanes, we are considering removing the loophole. That would make the Artistic a non-Open-Source license. This isn't a step we would take lightly, and there will probably be more than a year of consideration and debate before it happens.

The Artistic License requires you to make modifications free, but then gives you a loophole (in section 7) that allows you to take modifications private or even place parts of the Artistic-licensed program in the public domain!

Avoid. If you want to allow commercial forks, go for the X license (not the BSD license: see RMS's article on The BSD License Problem. If you don't, go GPL or LGPL.
--

The Poetic License

[Mendax Veritas]

Despite what I just said, I'm going to add one more open-source license to the world. However, breaking with current practice, this one will be quite short and not written in lawyerese. I call it "The Poetic License", and here it is:

• This source code is free.
  One flower becomes many.
  Make your code free too.

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.

The Greatest Gift of All

[Tom Christiansen]

I can't think of any restriction on "freedom" in the AL that wouldn't also constitute criminal fraud. For example, making an incompatible version that no longer compiles standard Perl programs, yet continuing to pretend that this is merely the standard Perl. This is what Larry was most trying to avoid, because this very thing did in fact really happen to him once before (albeit with a different program). He caught a lot of flak because of this unpleasantry. The burnt child fears fire, and all that.

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:

You may use, modify, distribute, and sell this program in any way you wish, provided you do not restrict others from doing the same.

And here's another:

You are permitted and encouraged to use this code in your own programs for fun or for profit as you see fit. A simple comment in the code giving credit would be courteous but is not required.

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.

Re:Main problem with the GPL

[mikera]

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.