Artistic License 2.0
| Author | The Perl Foundation |
|---|---|
| Latest version | 1.0 and 2.0 |
| Publisher | The Perl Foundation |
| Published | ? |
| DFSG compatible | Yes |
| FSF approved | 1.0 No (Yes, for Clarified Artistic License), 2.0 Yes |
| OSI approved | Yes (both) |
| GPL compatible | 1.0 No (Yes, for Clarified Artistic License), 2.0 Yes |
| Copyleft | No |
| Linking from code with a different license | Yes |
The Artistic License (version 1.0) is a software license used for certain free and open-source software packages, most notably the standard implementation of the Perl programming language and most CPAN modules, which are dual-licensed under the Artistic License and the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The original Artistic License was written by Larry Wall. The name of the license is a reference to the concept of artistic license.
Whether or not the original Artistic License is a free software license is largely unsettled. The Free Software Foundation 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 approach for Perl projects.
In response to this, Bradley Kuhn, 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.
The terms of the Artistic License 1.0 were at issue in a 2007 federal district court decision in the US, which suggested that FOSS-like licenses could only be enforced through contract law rather than through copyright law, 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 Supreme Court had changed the applicable law). However, this left undisturbed the finding that a free and open-source license nonetheless has economic value.
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