On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 09:58:35PM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote: > On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 12:24:00PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > > > The original Artistic license is not appropriate for licensing > > anything that is not approximately perl, because of the way it is > > worded. It is a terrible license. Do not use it. It's also highly > > questionable as to whether things licensed under it can be included in > > Debian, given the prohibitions on commercial distribution. Please ask > > upstream to replace it with the Clarified Artistic license (or some > > other free software license) before this is included in Debian. > > > > Oh bleh. Why the hell does DFSG #10 specifically mention it then? Historical. The Artistic license is basically only appropriate for perl (and perl modules) because of the way it's written[0], and in *that specific instance* there aren't any problems. (This is on my list of things to fix, probably by replacing it with the Clarified Artistic) > Interestingly the DFSG links to the Artistic licence at > http://www.perl.com/pub/a/language/misc/Artistic.html > whereas http://www.debian.org/intro/free links to it at > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php Even more interestingly, the latter is not a copy of the Perl Artistic license. I'm not really sure *what* it is, it's somewhere between that and the Clarified. elfsign is using the original, which can be found at /usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic. What are OSI playing at? Who uses this license? > I've already asked upstream to change it from: > > elfsign is property of Uninformed Research and is freely distributable under > the conditions that: > > 1) Modification of the code retains credit to the original author(s) > 2) The authors may not be blamed for any damages incurred from the use of > this software. > > to the Artistic licence, after specifically directing him to > > http://www.debian.org/social_contract > and > http://www.debian.org/intro/free Oops. Best to check with -legal before doing anything with licenses; there's a lot of stuff floating around that's misleading or outdated. > If the official line isn't what's on the website, we really should get it > fixed up. Yeah, these things take a painful amount of time, were backed up *years* by the voting system changes, and there have been higher priorities. I do plan on pressing for a DFSG revision this year, though. [0] Clauses like this crap: You may embed this Package's interpreter within an executable of yours (by linking); this shall be construed as a mere form of aggregation, provided that the complete Standard Version of the interpreter is so embedded. We *need* that clause, but this "interpreter" stuff doesn't make any sense for elfsign - it was written for perl. There are several more like this. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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