[Tim Peters]
From BeOpen.com's POV, so long as they were paying major bills, they would rather have download traffic tickle their ad banners than SF's ad banners.
Even though this should have been clear to me all the time, stating it explicitly triggers alarms for me. I just checked, and it appears that Python 2.0 is not available for download via ftp. In particular, it is not available via ftp from ftp.python.org! If it was there, mirrors all over the world would pick it up and bring it in a location near me (ftp.fu-berlin.de would be nearest) (*). So while making it available on SF may indeed give no advantage, making it available on python.org would provide users with alternative download locations, so that I don't feel the bandwidth limitation that Web download from pythonlabs.com produces. That would be a clear advantage to me, at least. Of course, having ftp mirrors would mean that many downloads do not tickle anybody's ad banners - which would probably be in the interest of other users as well, just not in the interest of BeOpen. So I'm curious how this conflict of interest is resolved... Regards, Martin (*) ftp://ftp.python.org/python/src/README does not even mention Python 2.0, and ftp://ftp.python.org/python/src/README.ftp says Note that some mirrors only collect the this directory (src), and the doc and contrib siblings, while the ftp master site, <URL:ftp://ftp.python.org/>, has much more. "Much more" may be true, just nothing recent... I probably should ask ftpmaster.python.org to put Python-2.0.tar.gz in that directory.