Python, licenses and CVS

[Hans Nowak]

Howdy y'all,

I'm currently developing a program (in Python, obviously) and plan to 
publish it. Before I do so, though, I would like to have some opinions
on the following:

- should I use a license / copyright notice?
- if so, which one would you recommend? 

I know of the GPL, Python license, BSD license etc, and opensource.org
has a long list of them, but I absolutely hate legalese, and reading
all of this and pondering the possible consequences of picking one
over the other makes me cringe. Does someone have a pointer to a
page with some concise explanations of these licenses?

Then there's a second point: I see that many projects use version
control (usually CVS). I tried using DJGPP's cvs, but it 
(unsurprisingly) doesn't work well on WinXP. There's such a thing
as WinCVS, but the whole process strikes me as clumsy... checking
in and out and committing every time something changes... what is
the point of this? What happens if you forget a step? Does it have
substantial benefits over versioning your files by hand, aside from
having a repository through which you can undo changes?

TIA,

--Hans