Questions for Guido van Rossum

[Courageous]

> As the copyright holder, they have the right to impose
> any license at all.

This doesn't strike me as correct. Once a license has been
licensed to a *particular party*, that license can't be
changed post-hoc by one of the sides unless the license
says it can be. And, reading over the python license, it
doesn't have that exclusion.

So for example, somewhere in one of these threads a poster
worried that CNRI could retract their license and therefor
bust all derivative works of python. I don't believe this
is actually possible. They can only change their license
for *new* license holders. Old ones (read: anyone holding
a copy of the python source prior to a change of the license)
are free and clear to use the python source under terms of
the older license.

I don't believe CNRI has much say in this matter. It's
contract law (of which the license, to the degree that
implied legal contracts are even valid, is an instance).

I'm not an attorney during my day or night job, but I
do think this is the way things stand. If someone knows
better, feel free to correct....



C//