[Python-Dev] Licensing // PSF // Motion of non-confidence (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Jul 6 02:13:35 CEST 2010

On Tue, 6 Jul 2010 07:05:58 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

As Brett noted, yes, the LICENSE file is complicated, but most people don't bother reading it themselves - they ask what FSF and OSI think of it, and get the answers "BSD style" and "GPL compatible" and are happy with that.

Which is the very wrong thing to do, though. License text should be understandable by non-lawyer people; IIUC OpenBSD has a very sane policy in this respect.

The corporate history is such that the PSF probably doesn't have the legal rights to simplify it

Yes, that's probably the real problem and why it's not of much use to argue about it. You have to trust the PSF (and/or python-dev), because the license text may not be able to change very soon (if any day at all).

Regards

Antoine.

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