On 17 October 2014 09:54, Ian Cordasco <[email protected]> wrote: > > A hobby is by definition what you do in your free time. Donald is clearly > encouraging Stefan to spend his free time as he wishes. None of us who > participate in our free time are obligated to support anything beyond our > desire to do so, unlike someone who's paid to work on their project(s). It > almost seems like you're nitpicking the valid usage of a word to pile into > an argument in which you have nothing valid to say. I know it doesn't > usually happen on mailing lists, but that's what it seems like here.
Folks, when somebody tells you that they find a particular term diminutive and insulting, *it is not OK* to tell them that they shouldn't feel that way. An honest description of how someone else's choice of words makes us feel should *never* be casually dismissed. In this particular case, not everything people do in their free time is appropriately classified as a hobby. Volunteering for charities, serving on the boards of corporations and non-profit organisations, and, in many cases, contributing to the open source community is better characterised as "volunteer work". A lawyer representing someone pro bono is expected to be just as professional as they would if they were getting paid, and the same is true for most open source contributors that identify as professional software developers. Yes, we're contributing on our own time on the community side of things, but we're bringing just as much professional expertise to bear regardless of whether we're getting paid or not. The fact is that community members (including Stefan) *have* been personally attacked, with examples including accusations of not caring about their users or the Python community as whole, due to their concerns around some of the legal details related to hosting packages directly on PyPI. In particular, PyPI is subject to US export regulations, a legal entanglement that developers from outside the US may prefer to avoid, and there's a clause in the terms and conditions which introduces some ambiguity as to whether or not it is attempting to override a project's own stated license (this isn't the intention, but the clause can certainly be read that way). In relation to the latter point, Red Hat, *as an organisation*, has proposed alternate wording for that clause (to no avail thus far). Finding time to pursue that kind of legally sensitive change is always a challenge (as it only affects a relatively small subset of package authors, and has potentially broad ramifications for the rights of PyPI consumers), but I expect the topic to eventually be raised again via the Python-legal-sig mailing list. These are not concerns that can just be waved away - they need to be taken seriously, and I believe both PEP 438 and PEP 470 represent good faith attempts to do just that. While it *is* convenient for end users when developers choose to host their releases directly on PyPI, that benefit doesn't override the interests of developers in choosing what licenses they choose to place on their work, or which legal regimes they choose to grant authority to. Offering an explicit, reliable, user experience for externally hosted packages is key to simultaneously respecting the interests of both end users downloading and discovering packages via PyPI, and developers retaining autonomy in relation to how they choose to engage with the intricacies of the global copyright system. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | [email protected] | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
