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 The OSI has "superseded" the license, recommending strongly that all users move to Artistic 2.0: http://opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-1.0.php ~spot _______________________________________________ Fedora-legal-list mailing list Fedora-legal-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legal-list
