license

[Arthur]

> Do you understand why that person is overwriting the file?  By this I
mean,
> since he too is the hero of his own story of his life, somewhere in his
> thoughts what he is doing makes perfectly good sense and is justifiable
> to him.  Do you know what those thoughts are?

> It is very likely that there is a solution out there that does not
> require lawyers, forking the project, or creative anger.  But I cannot
> help find it is because I don't know why he would do something like that.
> Why did this make sense for him?  Do you know?


He's in academia.  There are grants involved. As in $.

This gotta be big.  This gotta be important.  Must be, because there is this
big distribution of thousands and thousands of lines of code under what he
is doing (9 of which he wrote), and when one goes to the GUI, and hits Help,
Python Documentation - what do you see:

ALL ABOUT HIS PROJECT.

Its showmanship, mostly.

You have to understand his audience is not the traditional Python world.

His distribution includes Numeric - and hardly mentions the fact.

Frankly I think he knows at some level that he contributed very little
tangible to all this, and is overcompensating with a little razz - mazzaz..

His audience being mostly from outsidfe the Python world, well... its quite
impressive .

I suggested to him a "fix" to his distribution- literaly 4 keystrokes
involved - that would accomplish the reasonable purposes for which he might
want to be doing what he is doing, and *not* overwrite an existing Python
file. He refused.

Maybe as a bigshot coder myself, I have a particular attitude here.

A few posts have been indignant about my attitude toward an open source
developer.

He is not the developer.  That is crucial to all this.

I consider him however, the custodian of some damn nice code.  Not the
creator.  And I guess I feel the custodian role is different - and should be
*very* responsive to having that code serve as many people's needs as it
might.  My code, might help the code *to which he is custodian*, serve the
needs of 4 people it might not otherwise.  He, in my movie, should be
anxious to accommodate.

But as all the above indicates - sympathetic insight into other peoples
movies - not being a great strength of mine.


Art