Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Gary Momarison]

Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl> writes:

> Many people do m\not like GPL but if python had originally been released
> under GPL, CNRI wouldn't have been able to change that, and all this fuss
> wouldn't have been necessary.

Necessary for what?  Replace "GPL" with "M$-EULA-style binary-only
license" in your statement and it would be just as true.

Guido (and some other Python leaders) are good enough to want their work
to be usable by anyone with few restrictions.  That they don't want to
compel their code's users to open all their work is a Good Thing.

All this "fuss" wouldn't be necessary if the Python community simply
published all its code under one license, period.  Derivatives that
didn't use the license would not be Python, but people would be free
to develop them.  Some derivatives might become better than Python.
Freedom in software is not a bad thing except maybe to those who want 
to restrict freedoms, like GPL licensors.  But it's too late for that.

The community will decide whether the new license is onerous enough go
back to where the license changed or continue sharing ownership of the
current fork with CNRI.  I think the community should, just on
principle, tell CNRI where to stick their recent code, but that's easy
for me to say; I won't be doing the extra work.  I actually think CNRI
has good reason to want a better license; it's just sad that Python has
to be burdened with it forever.

If your only concern is for an "immutable license" one could be crafted
similar to the GPL but with fewer restrictions.  It could allow
binary-only distributions of derivatives.  But many find any kind of
coercive, viral-like license offensive, damn the practical results.
Yeah for idealism.  It's worked OK for *BSD, X11, and even to some 
extent for Mac OS X users.  Free software needs another generic 
license which would satisfiy corprate lawyers as well as the GPL but 
without the viral selfish bits.


The thing that REALLY bothers me here is that CNRI, as a virtual arm of
the US Government, should, in my philosophy, not be given copyrights in
their work, just like physical arms of the US Government are not given
copyrights in their work.  Sadly, our government pays companies to
develop something and then lets them keep it.  I'd like to see them try
that with hardware. Oh wait. I HAVE seen that (eg, arms factories). But
I didn't like it.