Active State and the PSF

[Thomas Wouters]

On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 03:43:08PM +0000, Jim Abrams wrote:

> 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?

Yes. But Python itself isn't covered by the GPL, and I doubt it ever will.
(At least not in the current form of the GPL)

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

Yes. The licence is the same, minus some minor details (like the
'choice-of-law' clause that the FSF found so disagreeable.) It's an Open
Source Initiative Approved Licence, meaning it has everything the OSI thinks
should be in an Open-Source licence, and now it's GPL-compatible, meaning
that you can link Python with GPL components and distribute that (under the
restrictions of the GPL.)

Previously (in 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1) you could not legally distribute binaries
linked against GPL code, because the FSF said the licence was not compatible
with the GPL. (It had restrictions that the GPL did not have, and the GPL
expressly forbids that.) You could *use* such a binary, but you weren't
allowed to distribute it.

The new licence is already checked into CVS, meaning that any code you grab
from the current CVS tree, you can do more than if you grabbed Python 2.1 :)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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