i have an apology to make to the python community. about 3 or 4 months ago a number of the pyjamas users became unhappy that i was sticking to software (libre) principles on the pyjamas project. they saw the long-term policy that i had set, of developing python-based pyjamas-based infrastructure (such as pygit) for pyjamas to become a demonstration of its own technology, as being unnecessarily restrictive, and for their convenience, they requested the use of non-free hosting services such as github, google groups and so on. i patiently explained why this was not acceptable as i am software (libre) developer, and advised them that if they wanted such services, perhaps they could help themselves to learn pyjamas and python by helping to improve the existing infrastructure, and that i would be happy to help them do so. many of them did not understand or accept.
what i did not realise was happening, until it was announced a few hours ago, was that in the intervening time a number of the pyjamas users had got together to develop alternative infrastructure which makes use of non-free hosting facilities such as github, and that they also planned to hijack the pyjs.org domain... *without* consulting the 650 or so members on the pyjamasdev mailing list, or the python community at large. so this is rather embarrassing because i had just put out a request for help to the wider python community, with the pyjamas 0.8.1 release, when it turns out that 12 hours later the domain has been hijacked. my first apology therefore is this: i apologise to the python community for being a cause of disruption. the second apology is - if priority can ever be applied to apologies at all - is i feel somewhat more important. i am a free (libre) software developer, and i am a teacher, as many of you will know from the talks that i have given on pyjamas at various conferences. i lead by example, and it is not just free software development itself that i teach, but also free software principles. this was why i set the long-term policy that pyjamas should migrate to running on python-based server infrastructure and pyjamas-based web front-end applications, *even* for its own development, because the most fundamental way to teach is to lead by example. my apology is therefore for the disruption caused to the pyjamas project - and to the python community - as a direct consequence of me wishing to uphold software (libre) principles, and for using the pyjamas project as a way to do that. that may sound incredibly strange, especially to those people for whom software (libre) principles are something that they just accept, but it is a genuine apology, recognising that there are people for whom free software principles are not of sufficient importance to have their day-to-day development made inconvenient. i don't know what else to say, so i'll leave it at that. sorry folks. l. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
