Quality control in open source development

[Chris Mellon]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Dave <dggoodwin07 at gmail.com> wrote:
> With the open source licenses that allow redistribution of modified
> code, how do you keep someone unaffiliated with the Python community
> from creating his or her own version of python, and declaring it to be
> Python 2.6, or maybe Python 2.7 without any approval of anyone at the
> PSF? Maybe their code is terrible, and not even compatible with the
> rest of Python!

In some projects, there's trademarks on the project name (for example,
Linus owns the Linux trademark), so you can mitigate confusion that
way. I don't know if the PSF owns the Python trademarks or not.

You can't stop them from forking and releasing their own code, even if
it's really bad. That's freedom for you.

> How can the PSF, for example, maintain the quality and
> coheren of new code contributed to be part of Python, or derivative
> works that claim to be some future version of Python? If licensees can
> redisribute as they like, isn't this a huge problem?

I think it's pretty self-evident that it's not a huge problem, don't
you? Do you see lots of low quality python forks cluttering up the
internet?

> Is this dealt
> with be restricting use of the Python trademarks?  Just curious..
>
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>