Active State and the PSF

[Jim Abrams]

I faintly remember a friend of mine at Sapient extolling his woes as having 
to use Tcl as an embedded language for some project of his. He was mostly 
upset that he couldn't use Perl because of the GPL would require that some 
portions of the project remain free?

This was where I pushed Python on him (of which he and other Sapient folk 
have converted), but the question I am getting at is:

Forgive my lazyiness in not deciphering the GPL, but does the GPL put some 
legal restriction of the use of GPL'ed widgets in commerical widgets?

Will the new Python license uphold the 'free to do just about anything' feel 
is has now?


"Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com> wrote in
<mailman.991021781.12258.python-list at python.org>: 

>[Thomas Wouters]
>> ...
>> I'd like to point out that the Python licence is an Open Source
>> licence, as well as a GPL compatible licence (as per Python 2.0.1,
>> 2.1.1 and/or 2.2, whichever comes first.)
>
>[Carel Fellinger]
>> Definitely GPL compatible in the near future?
>
>Multiply the probabilities attached to "definitely" and "near future"
>and I don't think better than "probably" is justified.  CNRI's lawyers
>maintained the license was always GPL-compatible, and as a matter of law
>that disagreement was never resolved.  The difference now is that the
>board of the PSF agreed to license changes that the FSF said will be
>enough that they too will agree the license is GPL-compatible.  So that
>part looks solid now -- still, other people *thought* they had agreement
>on this before, so IMO it's not certain until it's history.  "Near
>future" is less certain, since no release date has even been announced
>yet for any of 2.0.1, 2.1.1 or 2.2.
>
>> That's certainly good news!
>
>It certainly has potential to become good news <wink>.
>