Artistic License

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the artistic concept, see artistic licence.

The Artistic License is a software license used for certain free software packages, most notably the standard Perl implementation, most of CPAN modules and Parrot, which are dual-licensed under the Artistic License and the GNU General Public License (GPL). It was written by Larry Wall.

Whether or not the original Artistic License is a free software license is largely undecided. It is often heavily criticised for being ambiguous, self-contradictory, and thus virtually impossible to interpret. The Free Software Foundation has gone so far to say that it is not a free software license, however, this has never been a contentious issue since all notable software that uses the original Artistic License are dual licensed along with the GPL.

There exists an Artistic License 2.0 which everyone agrees is a free software license. It was written in response to a Perl community request for comments. The license was written by Bradley Kuhn, then working for Free Software Foundation, and seems to be scheduled for adoption by the standard Perl implementation when version 6 is released. There also exists a "Clarified Artistic License", which is also a free software license, currently being used by the SNEeSe and FakeNES emulators.

The name of the licence is a reference to the concept of artistic licence.