Why modifing the Artistic license is a good idea (was Re: licensing issues)

--wfU9hg8y/SNaC6Y2
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline

Chris Nandor <[email protected]> wrote:

> Absolutely.  And this "status quo" argument is why I think that it is
> reasonable to keep the current licensing scheme; it has served Perl very,
> very well.

I think, in some cases, it has not served Perl as well as it might have.
Namely, because the Artistic license is unclear.  The OSI and the Debian
group only reluctantly and with many reservations accepted the Artistic
license as an open source license.  The FSF has been unable to accept it as
a free software license, and some of these reasons are brought up in the
various RFCs I wrote.

> If the AL can be changed to satsify some lawyers,

It's not just lawyers.  The changes I have proposed can help satisfy
businesses, because it makes it more clear that they can charge money for
redistributing perl.  The current Artistic license is somewhat unclear on
this issue.

> while at the same time not becoming less readable (becoming more readable
> would be better) and certainly not imposing any more of a burden on the
> people who use it, then I am not opposed to it.

Why do you feel the AL-2.0 that I proposed is less readable than the current
one?  It's sadly too late to make changes in this round, as it's Larry's
hands, but I would like to hear from you how we might make it more readable
and perhaps propose a modified RFC to Larry at a later time.
 
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn  -  http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn

--wfU9hg8y/SNaC6Y2
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE6YiGQ53XjJNtBs4cRAuEXAJ9cRGB1zwPL/H3i1jBNLSwqaG7vYQCfbDb6
2H85ac2Kfe7n6bqrSLsmpu4=
=DfLR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--wfU9hg8y/SNaC6Y2--