The Python 1.6 License Explained

[Guido van Rossum]

"Neil Hodgson" <neilh at scintilla.org> writes:

> >       CNRI claims copyright in Python code and documentation from
> >       releases 1.3 through 1.6 inclusive.  However, for a number of
> >       technical reasons, CNRI never formally licensed this work for
> >       Internet download, although it did permit Guido to share the
> >       results with the Python community. *** As none of this work was
> >       published either***, there were no CNRI copyright notices placed on
> 
>    [My *s] Looks like it was published to me. It was made publically
> available. CNRIs web servers transmitted the work. How can they possibly
> contend that it was not published?

This was my own response too when CNRI first mentioned this to me,
many years ago.  According to CNRI, in the sense of copyright law you
only *publish* when you produce a tangible object like a book or a
record, and a downloadable file doesn't qualify -- copyright lawyers
treat it as a *public performance*, a term which was introduced into
copyright law for things like radio or tv broadcasts.

I personally believe that copyright law needs to be updated to include
websites under publication, but that's another battle, and it's not
mine...

Of course some of it *was* published in the formal sense, e.g. on the
CDs in the back of various books.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)