Many of you certainly have noticed the mess about the Python licensing.
In short words, the current owner of the Python copyright, CNRI, seems
to believe that almost all existing Python releases (1.3 up to 1.5.2)
were never really licensed to anybody (although they had a file
Misc/COPYRIGHT that included a BSD like license).
Now that Python's development team has left CNRI for BeOpen, CNRI wants
to release a final 1.6 version under a new license, which is distinctively
different.
Finally, there's now a FAQ about CNRI's viewpoint. I'd be glad if some
people with a more profound working knowledge about licensing issues
could take a look at this and comment from Debian's viewpoint:
http://www.python.org/1.6/license_faq.html
Note that there's also a link to the new license:
http://hdl.handle.net/1895.22/1011
The new license is OSI approved, but there are doubts whether it's
compatible with the GPL (cf. Q.7). I wonder which consequences this has
to have on our existing Python packages.
Gregor
