This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Perl Buzz by Andy Lester. Original Post: Artistic License 2.0 makes dual-license boilerplate unnecessary Feed Title: Perlbuzz Feed URL: http://perlbuzz.com/atom.xml Feed Description: What's happening in the world of Perl programming, including Perl 5, Perl 6, the CPAN and Parrot? Latest Perl Buzz Posts Latest Perl Buzz Posts by Andy Lester Latest Posts From Perlbuzz

The dual-licensing in much module boilerplate these days is unnecessary. You can simplify your licensing by using only the Artistic License 2.0.

There are plenty of modules out there that license themselves "under the same terms as Perl itself", and there are problems with that approach. For the past year or so I've been using the approach of being explicit about "Artistic or GPL, your choice", but that's unnecessary, too.

According to Allison Randal, one of the architects of Artistic License 2.0, "Artistic 2 allows for any GPL-like license, not just GPL 2. Specifically, it allows for GPL 3 or later, or a completely non-GPL copyleft license. So, the dual license is unnecessary."

There's a page on the Perl Foundation website about CPAN licensing guidelines that explains more options in more detail.

From here on out, my code is going to say:

=head1 LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2010, Andy Lester,

This module is free software.  You can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.