On Thu, 14 Dec 2000 11:45:44 +0900, Ben Tilly <ben_tilly / hotmail.com> wrote:
>By contrast Guido has tried to maintain more control over
>Python's licensing.

You're incorrect, and I'd like to stamp out this FUD.

Before version 1.6, the Python license was the same as the MIT X11
license.  With version 1.6, CNRI, GvR's former employer and my current
one, demanded a licensing change, very much against the will of GvR
and the Python community.  The 1.6/2.0 license, visible at
http://hdl.handle.net/1895.22/1012, is much longer, but most of the
terms have little bearing on what you can do with the software; only
terms 2 and 3 matter, and according to them you're still perfectly
free to use and distribute modified versions of the software.
Commercial products can embed Python and don't have to ship any source
code, Infoseek and CADscript being two examples of projects that do
that.  Nor do you have to hew to any language definition; the Alice
project made serious language-level modifications (case-insensitive
identifiers, and changing the definition of the / operator) and
redistributed the resulting binaries.  You're simply incorrect in this
statement.

>If this restriction appears likely to cause problems, then
>it may be worthwhile for someone to take some time out to
>come up with less restrictive replacements for the key
>sections.

PCRE might be worth contemplating as a BSD-licensed regular expression
library, since it provides Perl-compatibility and is fairly readable.
The pcre_compile() function is pretty hairy, though, but I'm sure
PCRE's author would accept improvements; he was quite friendly when I
was adapting PCRE to Python.

--amk