As far as I can tell the artistic licence is one of the reasons that perl has been so successful. Personally I think Larry was completely right in his decision not to follow the Free Software Foundation licensing model. His model allows corporations to use Perl in their products for free and to make money off it. This results in much more perl being used than it would if it had a more restrictive "open" licence. The wide spread use of perl is IMHO a consequence of its loose rules and open and inclusive licencing scheme. Also note that while many companies make considerable profits out of Perl, many of them pay money to the various charitable organizations that support our movement.

Frankly i think that Larrys model allows us to get the best of both worlds.

Also, I doubt that there is a licencing model that does not have flaws. The GPL had flaws that lead to the LGPL. The LGPL has flaws that means that some open source developers are ignoring its constraints to futher the development of interesting and useful tools. One that comes to mind is exporting GCC parse trees for analytical and debugging puposes (introspection of C/C++). Afaiui supporters of the GPL and LGPL do not allow for this on the grounds that it allows a way for external tools to use the products of GPL/LGPL software without explicitly linking to it. Thus it bypases the derivative works clause. However this restriction is antithetical to the spirit of the movement in that it hugely restrcits the ability to make third party tools to aid the GCC based developer. The result has been that a number of groups are now ignoring these limitations and building in support for this anyway.

Ultimately I think open source models should be rated by their effectiveness in providing open source software, and allowing that software to penetrate the market. So far I think the Artistic Licence succeeds quite well in both of these areas.

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....

In reply to Re: Re: Re: (OT) ActiveState by demerphq
in thread (OT) ActiveState by Anonymous Monk

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