License Preambles

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The Artistic License is the first of the academic licenses to consider its message important enough to warrant a license preamble. A copy of the current version of the Artistic License is shown in the Appendices. Its preamble starts as follows :

The intent of this document is to state the conditions under which a Package may be copied , such that the Copyright Holder maintains some semblance of artistic control over the development of the package, while giving the users of the package the right to use and dis tribute the Package in a more-or-less customary fashion, plus the right to make reasonable modifications. (Artistic License preamble.)

Preambles to open source licenses are occasionally written in strident political or philosophical terms (although the preamble to this Artistic License is not stridently political), intended to convince others of the rightness of the licensor 's position rather than to inform licensees of the rules they are to follow. Many lawyers believe license preambles are a bad place to make a political or philosophical statement. There are two reasons for that:

  1. Licenses establish terms and conditions governing the relationship between two parties, in our case a licensor and a licensee. The preamble is not a term or condition. It is merely a statement. Therefore, it has no positive legal effect and it is not binding on a court . As such, it is surplusage.

  2. The preamble may subtly conflict with the actual rules, or may be stronger or more conciliatory than the actual license provisions. There is no absolute rule that tells a judge that, in the event of a conflict between the preamble and the license terms, the license terms prevail. How a court will rule in the event of an actual conflict between the license and the preamble is difficult to predict.

While preambles and other philosophical arguments should not be used to qualify or modify the terms of software licenses, the points they make are important to some licensors. The software artists who wrote the Artistic License (and, as I will soon describe, the free software activists who wrote the GPL) spent a lot of time crafting their preambles. Those preambles should be read as general statements of the licensor's intent rather than as legally binding terms and conditions.

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Open Source Licensing. Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
ISBN: 0131487876
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 166

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