>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.*
Big deal.
If the licence is so unclear that it scares away some megacorporate
litiscum, then this is hardly all that great loss, no is it? Did
you *really* want to have to get involved with the sort of people
who would go trying to create little Pharisaical loopholes around
your expressed wishes? I don't think so.
Personally, I happen to *like* the encouragement to contact the
owner about this. If the AL succeeds in getting people to do this,
then more power to it.
Anybody who's unclear about what a licence is doing should of course
merely contact the actual owner of that software and simply *ask*
whether it would be ok with them to do such and such with their
software. If these grabbers can't be bothered even to pay the owner
of the IP that they intend to appropriate this (lamentably un)common
courtesy--if instead they'd rather just be sneaks and sharks and
*take* whatever they can sink there bloody claws into without so
much as a by-your-leave--then just forget about them.
I hold it as an imperturbable Article of Faith that it will be a
cold, cold day in Hell before Larry throws someone to the magistrates
over that person's alleged violations of the Artistic Licence as
it applies to Perl. And no one else can bring suit of damages done
against them here, because Larry is not just the Author, he's also
the Owner.
And gues what? If the Owner has no problem, there is no problem.
Have a nice day.
-tom
