amk / mira.erols.com (A.M. Kuchling) wrote:
>
>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.

I am not positive what I am misremembering.  However when I
look at http://www.python.org/1.6/license_faq.html I see
think I remember.  Prior to 1.6 the licensing was unclear,
there was no guarantee that the availability of the software
could not be revoked.  The new licensing situation is a vast
improvement, but as item 7 says, it is unresolved whether it
is GPL compatible.

So the licensing situation for Python is not entirely perfect
but it is not nearly as bad as I thought.  Thanks for the
correction.

> >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.

Better and better. :-)

Cheers,
Ben
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