[Fedora-legal-list] how artistic is this license?

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 03/22/2009 04:03 PM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> While I was packaging frinika [1], I realized that one of its
> dependencies, mrjadapter [2], comes with some "Artistic License" [3].
> 
> I can't tell what version of "Artistic License" this is. Can you tell
> me if this is free or not; and if not, can you tell me what makes it
> nonfree so I can inform frinika developers about it?
> 
> Thanks,
> Orcan
> 
> 
> [1] http://frinika.appspot.com/
> [2] http://homepage.mac.com/sroy/mrjadapter/
> [3] http://homepage.mac.com/sroy/artisticlicense.html

It looks like a modified version of Artistic 1.0. It is missing the
original clause 8, and big chunks of 7 and 6.

Unfortunately, removing sections from Artistic 1.0 is not enough to make
it free, if anything, it makes the intent less clear. As the FSF says:

"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."

Here is the text from the Release Notes for Fedora 10 about the removal
of all Artistic 1.0 code from Fedora:

We no longer permit code in Fedora under the Artistic 1.0 license for a
variety of reasons:

   1. The FSF says it is not a free license. They say that the text is
vague, and that it is open to misinterpretation.
   2. The Perl community agrees with this assessment. They went so far
as to rewrite the Artistic license to resolve all the identified
problems (see http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0).
   3. The OSI has "superseded" the license, recommending strongly that
all users move to Artistic 2.0:
http://opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-1.0.php

~spot