Re: Licenses on CPAN

Chris Nandor <[email protected]> writes:

> I do not think we should encourage ANY specific licensing terms for CPAN
> content, except that it should be an open source license of some kind.

I agree with this as a statement of general "official" policy; however,
I'll certainly encourage people who are using the Artistic License by
itself to either hire an intellectual property lawyer to clean it up if
they can, or if not to use a different license whose meaning is clear.

> I disagree entirely.  First, I don't think there is such a thing as
> legally holding water as a free software license.  :-)

There are no free software licenses that have specifically been held up in
court, but there is a paucity of legal precedent for *any* software
license.  Given the way the legal system tends to work, since it takes
into account common practice and general understanding, I would expect any
of the licenses which have withstood general legal scrutiny to be upheld
by a court pretty much as they're generally interpreted.

The GPL, the LGPL, the BSD license (original or modified), the X/MIT
license, and the MPL and NPL have undergone that scrutiny (as have the IBM
Public Source license and a few other lesser-used ones).  Given how
important it is that a license be legally valid, I would strongly
recommend using one of those licenses rather than making up your own or
using a license that hasn't been extensively legally reviewed, even if it
doesn't say precisely what you want it to.

Of course, if you're in a situation to add a new legally-reviewed license
to the pool of available choices by paying an intellectual property lawyer
to help you develop one, that's excellent, and everyone would be
delighted.

> As to picking another license, like the MIT: I honestly don't care.  I
> am not here to say the AL should be the license of choice.  I am here to
> say it is acceptable.  However, I like the AL and will stick with it
> (though I wouldn't mind minor changes to it for clarifications).

I find this really unfortunate, since I would therefore be extremely
reluctant to use any of the software you released under that license in
any sort of commercial product (despite the fact that I presume you intend
to allow that).

> One more thing, Bradley Kuhn wrote this:

>> Yet, we have documentation in the core and software on CPAN that is
>> Artistic-only, and thus isn't known to be free documentation/free
>> software.

> That is patently false.  Even Bruce Perens says that AL-licensed
> software is open source (though with heavy reservations, of course).

No, it is absolutely not patently false.  It's entirely accurate.  Perhaps
you've missed what the FSF says about the Artistic License (used by
itself), an opinion that I've heard is backed up by their legal counsel:

  The Artistic license. 
     We cannot say that this is a free software license because it is too
     vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their
     meaning is not clear. We urge you to avoid using it, except as part
     of the disjunctive license of Perl.

Remember, *licensing fails closed.*  If the license is too vague to be
valid, the result is that you can't use the software at all.  And nothing
scares corporate lawyers more than vagueness.  *In practice,* the use of a
vague license is going to strongly discourage anyone who cares about
licenses (which isn't most users of free software, but which does include
any large company or other institution with deep pockets worried about
lawsuit threats) from using your software.  If this is your intention, I
can't argue with its effectiveness, but if you're using the AL I would
have assumed that this is *not* your intention.

The AL says nice, free-software-like things, but it doesn't say them
clearly, in legal language, or in a fashion that has any assurance of
being interpreted "correctly" by a court.  It's a feel-good license, and
in the context of the dual licensing of Perl, that's what it's *intended*
to be, and it works very well for that purpose.  When used alone, you're
putting your software out to the world with some vague statements of
intention rather than a legally accurate license.  You may not care, and I
may not care, but the lawyers *do* care and *have* to care because in the
unlikely case that it will come up in a court, the judge will care.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>