The situation is a bit more complicated here.
We wanted to build a stackless python 2.8 because we had good reasons,
and we thought it would be totally acceptable.
To be safe, I started a "pep 0404" thread on python-dev, and then the issue
became a political problem.
And that problem was caused by core developers, very good friends of us,
who went so far to bring the licensing up, just to let me put down the idea
of "stackless python 2.8". They really tried everything to avoid this name,
"to avoid confusion".
I can't buy this, because I think Python users have a brain superior to an
amoeba, but at this point the discussion was already at a level where it was
better to give in.
They did not really want to use the license flare gun, but to convince us
that "python" and "2.8" should never be together in the same string.
I am core developer since 1998 too and don't want to make enemies,
so yeah, we probably could have done a real fork, but we want to keep the
long friendship, so we just dropped the name "python".
This compromise will hopefully work, although it has bent our goal quite
a bit.
(and their's probably too, but we will see what happens.)
cheers - chris
On 31.12.13 20:25, Stephen Hansen wrote:
On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 2:05 AM, Kristján Valur Jónsson
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What I don't understand is why cpython hasn't been forked long
ago. Does it have some legal status preventing it from that? And
whats with the mandatory contributors agreement? That sounds
really odd in the day and age of freely forkable open source projects.
All the mandatory contributor agreement does is allow a single entity
(PSF) to have legal control over the copyright of the core Python code
-- that gives them the ability to, for instance, alter its license if
there's some need down the road. It does NOT, in any way shape or
form, restrict the rights of anyone who gets the python code. The
python license is totally permissive and allows you to fork at will;
it has no special status. You are even free to fork, close it up and
release it as MyPy and refuse to let anyone get access to the code if
you want.
Your forked code will simply not be accepted back into PSF's
Python.org unless you're willing to sign the agreement.
Its a very reasonable way to run an open source project, especially
one that's been through headaches with licenses in the past. Having
the PSF control the legal rights to Python is very beneficial to the
community, IMHO. Some people are completely against such things and I
won't get into an argument over it-- but I just wanted to clarify, it
places *absolutely* no restriction on anything but submission of code
to Python.org's main repository from which official releases are made.
Also, Python has been forked several times. The forks rarely go
anywhere, though. I know of at least two attempts at forking it to get
rid of the GIL, for instance.
And now I go back to lurking. :)
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