Streaming XML-RPC?

[Magnus Lie Hetland]

In article <a88mdk$2pcv$1 at news.idiom.com>, Jim Dennis wrote:
[snip]
> IANAL, but:
>
> I thought that PSF and Guido came up with a GPL compatible license.

IANAL either, but:

Yup. But there's a difference between the Python license being GPL
compatible (i.e. you can distribute Python and friends under the GPL)
and the GPL being compatible with the Python license (i.e.
distributing GPL'ed stuff under the Python license.)

The GPL makes requirements that the Python license does not.

> Since I'm not releasing any code that mixes GPL and Python code
> I haven't scrutinized the licenses in detail.  So I don't know which
> versions of Python are covered by GPL compatible licenses, nor am I
> sure that the two licenses *are* actually compatible.

I think the crucial point is the way in which they are compatible.
(And they are not equivalent.)

E.g. you can distribute software under the Python license (or
derivatives) as closed-source commercial stuff, without providing an
open-source alternative. AFAIK, that is not allowed under the GPL.
Thus, releasing a GPL'ed package under the Python license would be
impossible (unless you were the owner, of course).

> However, it seems that the LGPL should be freely linkable even to 
> proprietary or other non-GPL code.

Yes.

> I was under the impression that
> this was the whole point of the *L*GPL.

Yes. But it still makes the same basic requirements as the GPL
(AFAIK). I couldn't redistribute the code itself under the Python
license (or any other non-(L)GPL open source license, I should
imagine).

At least this is my impression of how things work (and why so many
people rewrite GPL code and release non-GPL versions so that they can
be used in contexts such as the Python standard library). I may be
wrong, of course.

--
Magnus Lie Hetland                                  The Anygui Project
http://hetland.org                                  http://anygui.org