Call for Grant Proposals

[Tony Meyer]

> What you are saying is that all projects should be 
> open sourced but that may not be the case. Either that or you are 
> indiscriminately lobbying for the cause of open source irregards of 
> whether companies are ready for it or not, and then discriminating 
> against companies who are not ready for it yet.
[...]
> I will think that it is tyrannic to assume all work must be open
> sourced.

It seems to me that the idea here is (or might be) that all work benefiting
from these grants are open sourced, which is not the same as all work, at
all.  Given that Python is an open source project, and that the funding for
the grant comes from Python users (and some associated open source projects
like SpamBayes), this doesn't seem like a reasonable requirement.  In fact,
it seems that it's a reasonably logical one, one that the people that have
contributed the funding would appreciate, and one that would be most likely
to advance Python in some way.

Given that there is a wide variety of open source licence, and that Python
tends towards the least constrictive, it seems even less of a problem.  If,
for example, a funded project was to create some library for Python, which
might help out lots of other users, there would be nothing stopping a closed
source project making use of this library.  Sure other people could too, but
there are always strings attached to grants.

> But the wordings and inexactness of this call 
> for grant proposal makes it hard for me even to get to convince my 
> people that we should put in an application, not mentioning the 
> rubber-stamping.

Well, it seems to me that the trouble here is really that you haven't
managed to hear back officially from the grant committee yet.  But, as you
probably know, there are always issues that need to be clarified with
grants, and especially so with the first time that a grant is offered.
Likewise, grant committee are always slow to respond to questions (even
those that aren't run by volunteer organisations).

=Tony Meyer