The Artistic License is a software

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

used for certain

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

packages, most notably the standard implementation of the Perl programming language and most

CPAN The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. ''CPAN'' can denote eith ...

modules, which are dual-licensed under the Artistic License and the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

(GPL).

History

Artistic License 1.0

The original Artistic License was written by

Larry Wall Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language. Personal life Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at S ...

. The name of the license is a reference to the concept of

artistic license Artistic license (alongside more contextually-specific derivative terms such as poetic license, historical license, dramatic license, and narrative license) refers to deviation from fact or form for artistic purposes. It can include the alterat ...

. Whether or not the original Artistic License is a

free software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...

is largely unsettled. The

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

explicitly called the original Artistic License a non-free license, criticizing it as being "too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear". The FSF recommended that the license not be used on its own, but approved the common AL/GPL

dual-licensing Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licenses ...

approach for Perl projects. In response to this,

Bradley Kuhn Bradley M. Kuhn (born 1973) is a free software activist from the United States. Kuhn is currently Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence of the Software Freedom Conservancy, having previously been executive director. Until 2010 he was the FLOSS Co ...

, who later worked for the Free Software Foundation, made a minimal redraft to clarify the ambiguous passages. This was released as the Clarified Artistic License and was approved by the FSF. It is used by the Paros Proxy, the JavaFBP toolkit and

NcFTP NcFTP is an FTP client program which debuted in 1990 as the first alternative FTP client. It was created as an alternative to the standard UNIX ftp program, and offers a number of additional features and greater ease of use. NcFTP is a command-l ...

. The terms of the Artistic License 1.0 were at issue in

Jacobsen v. Katzer ''Jacobsen v. Katzer'' was a lawsuit between Robert Jacobsen (plaintiff) and Matthew Katzer ( defendant), filed March 13, 2006 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The case addressed claims on copyright, p ...

in the initial 2009 ruling by the

United States District Court for the Northern District of California The United States District Court for the Northern District of California (in case citations, N.D. Cal.) is the federal United States district court whose jurisdiction comprises the following counties of California: Alameda, Contra Costa, Del ...

declared that

FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies *Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company * Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway *Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), United ...

-like licenses could only be enforced through

contract law A contract is a legally enforceable agreement between two or more parties that creates, defines, and governs mutual rights and obligations between them. A contract typically involves the transfer of goods, services, money, or a promise to tran ...

rather than through

copyright law A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

, in contexts where contract damages would be difficult to establish. On appeal, a federal appellate court "determined that the terms of the Artistic License are enforceable copyright conditions". The case was remanded to the District Court, which did not apply the superior court's criteria on the grounds that, in the interim, the governing Supreme Court precedent applicable to the case had changed. However, this left undisturbed the finding that a free and open-source license nonetheless has economic value. Jacobsen ultimately prevailed in 2010, and the Case established a new standard making terms and conditions under Artistic License 1.0 enforceable through copyright statutes and relevant precedents.

Artistic License 2.0

In response to the

Request for Comments A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or g ...

(RFC) process for improving the licensing position for

Perl 6 Raku is a member of the Perl family of programming languages. Formerly known as Perl 6, it was renamed in October 2019. Raku introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. Compatibility with Perl was not a goal, though a compatibili ...

, Kuhn's draft was extensively rewritten by Roberta Cairney and

Allison Randal Allison Randal is a software developer and author. She was the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, a member of the board of directors for The Perl Foundation, a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2010 to 2012, and the ...

for readability and legal clarity, with input from the Perl community. This resulted in the Artistic License 2.0, which has been approved as both a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

license. The Artistic license 2.0 is also notable for its excellent

license compatibility License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirement ...

with other FOSS licenses due to a

relicensing Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in s ...

clause, a property other licenses like the GPL lack. It has been adopted by some of the Perl 6 implementations, the

Mojolicious Mojolicious is a real-time web application framework, written by Sebastian Riedel, creator of the web application framework Catalyst. Licensed as free software under the Artistic License v 2.0, it is written in the Perl programming language, and is ...

framework, NPM, and has been used by the

Parrot virtual machine Parrot was a register-based process virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently. It is possible to compile Parrot assembly language and Parrot intermediate representation (PIR, an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and ...

since version 0.4.13. It is also used by the SNEeSe

emulator In computing, an emulator is Computer hardware, hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run so ...

, which was formerly licensed under the Clarified Artistic License. The

OSI OSI may refer to: Places * Osijek Airport (IATA code: OSI), an airport in Croatia * Ősi, a village in Veszprém county, Hungary * Oši, an archaeological site in Semigallia, Latvia * Osi, a village in Ido-Osi, Ekiti State, Nigeria * Osi, Ekiti ...

recommends that all developers and projects licensing their products with the Artistic License adopt Artistic License 2.0.

References

R.E.M. R.E.M. was an American rock band from Athens, Georgia, formed in 1980 by drummer Bill Berry, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills, and lead vocalist Michael Stipe, who were students at the University of Georgia. One of the first alternative ...

's choice of the Artistic License 2.0 for videos from one of their albums. {{FOSS Free and open-source software licenses

History

Artistic License 1.0

Artistic License 2.0

See also

References

External links