The Perl Foundation Opens Public Review of Artistic License 2.0 Draft

CGIDir
Friday, April 21, 2006; 03:43 AM

After 5 years of work, new version of the Artistic License for Perl 6 is available for review on the Perl Foundation's (TPF) legal page (http://www.perlfoundation.org/legal/). According to use.perl.org, the goal of the license update is to preserve Perl creator Larry Wall's original intent, while making the meaning clearer both to lawyers and to users. A Contributor License Agreement has been added to document the relationship between contributors, users, and TPF. You'll find the latest drafts of the Artistic 2.0 and the Contributor License Agreement.

From the notes, accompanying the Artistic License 2.0: "The heart of the Artistic license is the idea that artists, people who create things, should be able to have ongoing artistic involvement in their work. The goal of the Artistic 2.0 revision is to make the terms of the original Artistic License clearer and more readable. In some cases we expanded it to make it more legally specific. In some cases we made the language more general so the license may fit better with past and future changes in technology."

The Contributor License Agreement "is designed to serve the Perl community, including contributors to projects of the Perl Foundation ('Foundation'), the open source projects and products the Foundation supports, and the users of these projects and products. In order to document the non-exclusive intellectual property license granted for contributions to the projects, the Foundation obtains a Contributor License Agreement ('CLA'), signed by each Contributor. Under the CLA the contributor retains ownership of each Contribution, and remains free to use each contribution independently of the Foundation for other purposes."