Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Martijn Faassen]

John W. Stevens <jstevens at basho.fc.hp.com> wrote:
> Grant Griffin wrote:
>> 
>> Piet van Oostrum wrote:
>> >
>> > 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.
>> 
>> But without its generous CWI license, many of the commercial uses of
>> Python (which have undoubtedly contributed to its success) would not
>> have been possible.

> Really?  You are saying that there are a lot of companies that have
> taken the Python source code, modified it, and are making money off of
> it, and that they couldn't have done this under the L\GPL?

> Who?  And why?

Let's take Digital Creators, who made Zope. Right now Zope is
open source under a liberal license, but Zope used to be Principia,
which was sold. Digital Creations would likely not have produced 
Principia with Python if Python had a more restrictive license
such as the GPL (LGPL might've been okay, though I'm not sure how
it fits an interpreter) if this had required them to release their own
Principia source code as well.

Now in the time of Principia the Digital Creations folks contributed
quite a bit to the Python library (for instance cPickle), and an
important part of Zope is ExtensionClass, which does go quite deep
into the core of Python (though it can be loaded as module).

And later on the entirety of Zope went open source.

So in a way one can see this as a kind of a spin-off of the very
liberal nature of the Python license. Of course one can't say for
sure that the GPL would've thrown a spanner in the wheels, I do think
a good case could be made.

Anyway, of course there are pros and cons to licenses, which is why
we have different ones. Though some licenses, naming no names, seem to
be purely created just to be different instead. Or for other reasons
not clearly explained by the license inventing party yet.

[snip long licensing debate that should move to Slashdot or someplace
like that :)]

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?