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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 :
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:
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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