Questions for Guido van Rossum (Was: ...Tim Peters)

[Gary Momarison]

joneshenry at my-deja.com writes:

> In article <LNBBLJKPBEHFEDALKOLCKELKGNAA.tim_one at email.msn.com>,
>   "Tim Peters" <tim_one at email.msn.com> wrote:
> 
> Could you answer the following points raised in the article
....

Henry, please be careful with your quoting.  Tim Peters did not write that.

> Thanks to Tim Peters for his honest, informative, and
> thoughtful answers to these troubling questions.

Amen.


I seem to be in a verbose mood, so I'll add some comments you can
ignore at your pleasure.  I just discovered this topic yesterday.

Someone said that 1.6a2 was the last version with the old CWI license
only. It seems that CNRI wants to put their new license on "1.6 final"
(whatever the offical name is).  You and I (and maybe BeOpen?) could
take 1.6a2 and start a fork which only carries the CWI license and our
new license, if any, and probably win in court if both we and CNRI
wanted to take it to court.  But Guido (and maybe BeOpen?) needs to
keep CNRI happy for some reasons I don't quite understand. He
probably just doesn't want to risk being sued, regardless of his
innocence.  Maybe he published 1.6a2 with the CWI license without
getting all the proper permissions from CNRI.  Some older articles 
probably have the answer.

As to whether CNRI thinks the old license is "valid", you probably
shouldn't care unless you find yourself in CNRI's boots.  The old
license "is what it is".  CNRI seems to just have a worried lawyer
that wants to decrease CNRI's exposure to lawsuits.  For anybody
but CNRI, a new license can be nothing but bad news.  (Even though
it might have some improvements. Because anybody could make the
same improvements in a derivative.)  The question is whether it is 
bad enough to merit a bunch of rework which Guido probably could
not be involved in legally.  Probably not.

That's all I know and probably more.