[Draft] Open Letter to CNRI: Request for clarification

[Peter Schneider-Kamp]

For your enjoyment - the first version of this draft:

--- begin not-so-serious draft
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  Corporation for National Research Initiatives, you weary giant of
lawyerism,
I come from comp.lang.python, the home of the Python Community. On
behalf of
the future, I ask you of the past to leave Python alone. Your licenses
are
no longer welcome among us. You have no sovereignty over our language.

  We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I
address
you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
speaks. I declare the global language community we are building to be
naturally independent of these new tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
You
have no moral right to bind us to your new licenses nor do you possess
any
methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Do not think that
you can
build Python as though it were a public construction project. You
cannot. It
is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. 

  You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation. You do
not
know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already
provide our
language more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. 

  You claim there are problems with the old license you need to solve.
You
use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. These problems
don't
exist. In our world software needs to be free. Our world is different.
Your
legal concepts of property and control do not apply to us.

  We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the
benevolent
dicator for life, our governance will emerge . Our identities are
distributed
across many jurisdictions. The only laws that all our constituent
cultures
would generally recognize are the Golden Rule and the Freedom of
Software.
We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis.
But
we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. 

  In the last weeks you have tried to impose a new license on the Python
langugage. You are terrified of your own project, since you fear that
you are
loosing control with the move of the Python development team to BeOpen.
Because you fear this, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental
responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves.

  These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same
position as a certain group of lovers of freedom and self-determination
who
in 1776 had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We
must
declare our beloved language immune to your sovereignty, even as we
continue
to consent to your rule over older versions.

  We will create our own version of Python. May it be more free and
succesful
than the one you have made before.

                                                            Trondheim,
Norway                                                                                                                             
July 28, 2000
                                                     Jan Peter
Schneider-Kamp

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<wink>-ly
Peter

    "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible 
     will make violent revolution inevitable."
                               -- John F. Kennedy
--
Peter Schneider-Kamp          ++47-7388-7331
Herman Krags veg 51-11        mailto:peter at schneider-kamp.de
N-7050 Trondheim              http://schneider-kamp.de