Public Domain Python

[William Tanksley]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 20:54:42 GMT, Grant Edwards wrote:
>In article <slrn8s2d1k.5rr.wtanksle at dolphin.openprojects.net>, William Tanksley wrote:

>>This time it's a little scarier, because what we see is a company which
>>has NO ongoing responsibity for Python excercising ongoing authority. That
>>IS frightening, even for me.  They have almost no accountability to their
>>users now, and will not have any at all in the future -- yet they're
>>attempting to excercise authority over our use of a tool which we accepted
>>under very different terms.

>Gee, a company with no ongoing responsibility for a piece of software, no
>accountability to their users (now or future) who tries to exercise
>authority over our use of a tool.

>That sounds _exactly_ like all of the commercial software vendors I've ever
>dealt with.  

First of all, Python isn't supposed to be commercial software.  Comparing
it to worst-case commercial software isn't right -- I don't want Python to
ever be as bad as BEST-case commercial software.

Second, no it doesn't.  Commercial software vendors are tyrants, but
they're also accountable to their users.  The WORST cases you can come up
with have been tried, and theycan cause terrible problems for the users --
for a little while, in a limited market, and in all cases, the problem was
that the company wasn't accountable to its customers.

CNRI is NOT accountable to us, yet it IS changing the license.  That is
enough right there to strike fear into anyone's heart.  The fact that THIS
license is nice doesn't mean that they won't just up and do it again!

>The difference is that with things like Python, gdb, etc. 

> 4) if other people stop supporting the product I at least have the
>    choice of supporting it myself if I want to. 

This is the beautiful thing about open source.  It's what I'm worried
about CNRI taking away from us!  If they can change the license like this,
and make the license retroactive to the first version they released, then
what's to prevent them from doing worse in the future?

They already seem to have the authority to insist on a relatively
unpopular clause; thank goodness they're not doing more, but why not?
What's to prevent them from suddenly deciding to release a truly final
version of the license which IS actually and deliberately
GPL-incompatible?  Or worse yet, why can't they just release a grudge
license which specifies things we don't want to specify?  I don't know
their motives, and I don't want to have to know them.

Please understand that I *am* overreacting, and doing so deliberately. I'm
suprised that nobody's noticed these obvious problems before, and I'm
annoyed that you could so callously brush them aside as though they were
somehow anti-open-source.  If I weren't overreacting, I wouldn't be coming
up with all of these improbable and silly scenarios.

But after all, I am trained in computer security; improbable and silly
scenarios are how I make my living :-).

>Grant Edwards

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley