I just saw Allison's announcement of the OSI approval of Artistic License 2.0, in the form of a TODO ticket for Parrot.
I have not followed the license elaboration/approval process and I didn't even know what changed. But the license is incredibly clear and (I think) the essence is that paragraph by Allison:
That means there's no issue anymore about the dual licensing of the code which adopts this license. You adopt Artistic 2.0 and that's fine. Will Perl 5 adopt this as well?
For CPAN authors, many release under "This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself" and stick "license: perl" into the META.yml/Makefile.PL/Build.PL distribution files. I suppose that, when times comes, the search.cpan.org will show that as "License: Perl (Artistic2)" instead of the current "License: Perl (Artistic and GPL)". Right?
Update: Uhm, I haven't seen Artistic 2.0 approved by OSI before I wrote that entry. It's because I hardly look to everything else but the "Recent Journals" section.
Since the Artistic 2.0 allows relicensing under any pure copyleft license (which includes the various versions of GPL and LGPL), the effect of the dual licensing model is now handled by the Artistic 2.0 alone.
Perl 5 will ship under Artistic 2.0
Allison on 2007-06-10T22:51:41
Yes, the plan is to shift Perl 5 over to the Artistic 2 license, after we have signed contributor agreements from a significant number of contributors. It will be a much slower transition cycle than Parrot, though (reflecting the difference between software in production use, versus software in pre-beta development). It's likely the change will be timed to coincide with the 5.10 release. That'll give the community plenty of time to discuss the change, and be comfortable with the results. The Artistic 2.0 was carefully designed so that all current uses of dual licensed Artistic 1.0 + GPL software can continue under the Artistic 2.0.
