[Python-Dev] Licensing issue (?) for Frozen Python? [was: More optimisation ideas] (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Fri Feb 5 23:42:46 EST 2016

On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Of course if you want to you can GPL Python (I think that's now possible, at one time there was a issue with the CNRI license IIRC), and then licensees of your distribution (but not you!) are required to distribute source.

And even the GPL doesn't require you to distribute the source along with every copy of the binary. As long as the source is available, it's acceptable to distribute just the binary for convenience. For instance, on my Debian systems, I can say "apt-get install somepackage" to get just the binary, and then "apt-get source somepackage" if I want the corresponding source. IANAL, but I suspect it would be compliant if the same way of obtaining the C source code also gets you the unfrozen stdlib.

So yeah, no licensing problem.

ChrisA

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