Public Domain Python

[Tim Peters]

[Grant Griffin]
> ...
> And Perl's license is best of all:  Use the GPL if you want to (for
> its marketing appeal), or use Perl's truly free "Artistic License" if
> you want.  (Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too? <wink>)

Actually, the Artistic License is pretty obnoxious wrt derivative works:

    http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.html

Dual licensing is also a practical pain, as most people have no idea what
they're doing (more power to them!), and some Perl stuff released under the
Artistic License alone has shown up in GPL'ed distributions (when you suck
down a Perl pkg from CPAN, do you stop to read its license before using it
in *your* pkg?  fat chance).  Then the exorcists get called in, and rather
than make progress on the *software*, people piss away their time trying to
straighten out the license mess.

> ...
> 1. Linus Torvalds is an extremely good marketer.  In fact, he's the
> marketer that Richard Stallman never will be.  (Tim Peters is an
> excellent marketeer as well.  It's a really good thing Guido's found
> him. <wink>)

I found poor Guido, and I'm a terrible marketeer unless I'm talking tech
stuff with techies.  Cray Research was the first and last employer I've had
that truly valued those particular marketing skills:  when I told a
potential customer that I wouldn't trust our latest compiler "any farther
than I could spit a rat", they were delighted to find someone owning up to
what they had already concluded.  For a 15 million dollar machine (back when
a million wasn't just chump change <wink>), they didn't want to hear
relentless happy-happy talk, they wanted to hear that their problems were
real, understood, and being addressed.  I wasn't even aware of the art of
"spin control" until my next employer.  Now I *never* say a glass is half
empty.  Now I say it's in a transitional state on the near edge of a quantum
leap to the next level in fullness space.

sorry-but-i-still-choke-on-the-word-"enterprise"-ly y'rs  - tim