What's the license on the BerkeleyDB code from Sleepycat?
There are two licenses: One that they call the "open source license", see
http://www.sleepycat.com/license.net
There is also a commercial license.
Can we legally distribute RPMs or other binaries containing it? (I thought there were some restrictions that make it not open source.)
It depends. This is the condition:
# Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on # how to obtain complete source code for the DB software and any # accompanying software that uses the DB software. The source code # must either be included in the distribution or be available for no # more than the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee, and must be # freely redistributable under reasonable conditions.
So distributing Python itself should be no problem.
It's similar to GPL's "copyleft". I think it's no different from what we do with e.g. GNU readline, so I think it's okay. Redistributors of Python in binary form will have to beware though. I wonder if we're on thin ice with the RPMs (since we don't clarify any of this)? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)