Python license (was RE: Python plug-ins for Adobe Products available)

[Andrew Dalke]

Grant Griffin wrote:
>but just let me leave
>you with a thought: when you think of the free/open software as a
>"survival of the fittest" process, software licensed under a BSDish
>license can survive and reproduce in a wider variety of environments
>than GPL software.
>
>(and-the-ability-to-survive-in-nearly-any-environment-is-why-you
>   -humans-seem-to-be-taking-over-this-planet-<wink>)-ly y'rs,

Suppose you are an organism able to eat hydrogen sulphide, rust and
other chemicals better than anything else while releasing nasty oxygen
as a waste product.  Everything works fine for the first billion years,
but the wastes build up, and you start dying from your own exhaust
products.

In the meanwhile, some wimpy little organism, with few talents other
than the ability to use oxygen, takes over.  But it's tricky!  It
doesn't do the nice thing and bind the oxygen back to iron or otherwise
bury it.  If so, you could still thrive.  Instead, it learns how to
use sunlight to make more oxygen, keeping the world toxic for you and
your kind, other than exotic places like thermal vents at the bottom
of the sea.

The ability to live in many different environments doesn't help.  Only
the ability to live in the one which happens.

In other words, if 99% of available software is GPL'ed, it's really
hard to go through the effort to write a non-GPL'ed equivalent, given
the amount of code which goes into things these days.

Fighting-on-the-side-of-anaerobic-software'ly y'rs

                    Andrew
                    dalke at acm.org