Questions for Guido van Rossum (Was: ...Tim Peters)

[Tim Peters]

[Gary Momarison]
> ...
> You and I (and maybe BeOpen?) could take 1.6a2 and start a fork
> which only carries the CWI license and our new license, if any,
> and probably win in court if both we and CNRI wanted to take it
> to court.

This isn't a dance, though:  to end up in court requires only one party's
desire to tango.  "So sue us" is, as has been mentioned before, one of
BeOpen's fallback positions.  Depending on which lawyer people have asked,
CNRI would win, "we" would win, or the ultimate disposition is unclear.
Finding out for sure would be an expensive and time-consuming distraction.

> But Guido (and maybe BeOpen?) needs to keep CNRI happy for some
> reasons I don't quite understand.

Nobody needs to keep CNRI happy, but both sides would *like* to keep each
other happy if possible.  CNRI also holds copyright on the community's
primary web site (http://www.python.org/), owns the python.org and
jpython.org domain names,  runs the Python Software Activity, hosts the
Python Consortium, and its subsidiary (Foretec Seminars, Inc.) has been
running the annual Python Conferences.  They are deep ties here!  It's in
everyone's interests to remain friendly, if at all possible.  Accepting the
CNRI license is one of the things BeOpen will do if the license is thought
tolerable by the community.  In the other direction, e.g., CNRI just
restored the four ex-CNRI PythonLabs guys' admin access to python.org (CNRI
had cut off their access on June 30th, as we were *about* to release Python
2.0b1 with a new license (BSD) CNRI didn't like).

I can't know what would have happened if this were *purely* a license
dispute, but romantic dancing is certainly more fun if you don't have to
juggle 50 partners at once <wink>.

guido--the-fred-astaire-of-open-source-ly y'rs  - tim