Does Guido Have A Will? (The legal kind <wink>)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <LbLB4.2433$l3.21924 at typhoon.southeast.rr.com>,
Don Tuttle <tuttledon at hotmail.com> wrote:
>If Guido where to drop dead tomorrow, God forbid, who would control (own)
>Python?  I would guess Tim Peters would be a likely candidate. But with our
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I can't bring myself to invest any emotional
energy in even speculating about such a par-
ticular.  Guido's a good man, and, among much
else, he should have the freedom to move on
from Python without abandoning everything else
from this realm.

The general question, though, is one of at
least mild interest.  I suspect Eric Raymond
has thought about it at some length.  Here's
my expectation:  the community would achieve
consensus.  That is, the principal actors
would rub up against each other and mumble
rather randomly for a bit, until a clear and
generally satisfying answer emerged, and then
everyone would happily agree to it.  An answer
would be something like, "The six Elders A, B,
..., F will run it [something like the commit-
tee-work of PHP and Apache]" or "Corporation N
has committed to maintaining and extending
version Q, even while academicians H, I, and J
are moving the main fork of development to P."
General principle:  the community always cal-
culates legitimacy on technical merits (even
when the calculations are occasionally faulty).
This is *not* the Court of some arm of the United
States, where everybody accepts that the valuable
property belongs to the wicked nephew because
that's what the rules say.  The community seeks
consensus (with occasional bifurcation); that's
what it finds.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html