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

[Greg Ewing]

Gary Momarison wrote:
> 
> All licenses are contracts. Any
> agreement between two people is a contract.

But a license (of the sort we're talking about here,
at least) isn't a two-way thing, it's a one-way
thing. In this case, it's a statement of what CNRI
is willing to allow people to do with its intellectual
property. It doesn't require anyone to agree to it in
order to be effective. If it disallows something, it
still disallows it even if someone doesn't agree with
that.

So I can't see how you can regard it as a contract.

Incidentally, this means that all the stuff about
clicking on the ACCEPT button is meaningless and
superfluous. Worse, I think it's misleading, because
it gives the impression that it *is* a contract that
you can accept or reject, when in fact it is not.

> But I suspect that even if it said "The public may 
> forever pass.", it would be revocable.

But I hope that it wouldn't be *retroactively*
revocable! If someone passed yesterday, and I change
the sign today, I can't prosecute them for crossing
yesterday.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg