Hello Simutrans community.
I know this topic has been discussed to death (I have seen other thread topics on licenses). However, I haven't found any recent ones on this exact subject. I currently volunteer for a GNU/Linux distro that follows the GNU project in terms of licensing and free software. Currently we don't accept programs that are under the Artistic License 1.0 license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ArtisticLicense). However, we do accept programs under Artistic License 2.0 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ArtisticLicense2).
I could not find any recent discussions about this and was wondering if there was any consideration towards possibly migrating to the Artistic 2.0 license? We would love to have your package in our distro.
Thank you for your time.
P.S. Sorry if this is the wrong section of the forum for this. I wasn't sure where to post.
The first question is: can Artistic License 1.0 be upgraded to Artistic License 2.0, or must all contributors past or present agree? If the latter, there might be problems.
This has been discussed before - there is some confusion over whether the Artistic Licence or Clarified Artistic Licence was used (I'm not sure 2.0 was around at that time). I know when I the original discussion happened about open sourcing I suggested the Clarified version (and as far as I understood this was the one to be adopted, but then the 1.0 version was).
Migrating to the Artistic 2.0 licence is likely to be impossible, owing to difficulty contacting some former developers (that's the mild way of putting it).
About licenses claiming more free than other is as much useful as religions claiming more true than others. The artistic licence forbid selling for money, while GNU allows it. Since we want to disallow that, I do not see any way to make this compatible. Moreover, changing the licence is impossible, once fixed. Blame the people who constantly update licences. (OpenTTD has the same "trouble" with GCC 3.0, which was also not around when the first version was released ... )
Ok, thank you for your answers.
v2 wasn't around then, yet. Unfortunately. I think I offered clarified as a reasonable choice after browsing the listings of FSF and OSI, but where the decision went later... who knows. I'm not sure myself. The license is what it is, howg! Anyway, the "non-commercial" requirement is pretty much mutually exclusive with libre licenses... :-(