{{For|the artistic concept|artistic licence}}
The '''Artistic License''' is a software [[license]] used for certain [[free software]] packages, most notably the standard [[Perl]] implementation and most [[CPAN]] modules, 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 was criticised by the [[Free Software Foundation]]
as being "too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear."[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html] They advised that the license not be used on its own, but recommended the common AL/GPL dual-licensing approach for Perl projects.

In response to this, [[Bradley Kuhn]], who later worked for 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 [[SNEeSe]] and [[FakeNES]] [[emulators]], the [[Paros Proxy]] and [[NcFTP]].

In response to the [[Request for comments]] process for improving the licensing position for [[Perl 6]], this draft was extensively rewritten by [[Roberta Cairney]] and [[Allison Randal]] for readability and legal clarity, with input from the Perl community. This resulted in the '''Artistic License 2.0''' which has been approved as both a Free[http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html] and Open[http://www.nabble.com/License-Committee-Report-for-May-2007-tf3872801.html] license.

It is be scheduled for adoption by the standard Perl implementation when [[Perl 6|version 6]] is released, and has been used by the [[Parrot virtual machine]] since version 0.4.13.

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

==External links==
* [http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_1_0 The Artistic License] (the original Artistic License 1.0, the one which is still used by Perl and CPAN)
* [http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0 The Artistic License 2.0] (used by Parrot)
* [http://dev.perl.org/rfc/346.html 2.0 revision RFC process]
* [http://www.statistica.unimib.it/utenti/dellavedova/software/artistic2.html The Clarified Artistic License]
* [http://crepuscule.sourceforge.net/ Dusk] first online Novel and Blog written under Artistic License 2.0

[[Category:Open source licenses]]
[[Category:Free software licenses]]


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