Hi. I work for a small company (actually in process of forming) interested in embedding or extending python as part of our commercial non-open-source product. We have legal counsel, but are interested in the spirit as well as the letter of the law. Not much seems to have been written about the python license since version 2, so pointers to more recent discussions or contacts are appreciated. If this is not the right place to ask these questions, I would welcome better ideas.
We've read the license and "layman's language" at http://www.python.org/psf/license/ and are need help reconciling the two. First Observation The entire license -- such as produced by license() -- includes a lot of information which appears to be historical or anecdotal, not the kind of language our lawyers usually see in licensing agreements. Lawyers claim they don't like "extra" language. You be the judge. :) First Question Is all of that information really a required part of the license we pass on to our customers or is the "PYTHON SOFTWARE FOUNDATION LICENSE VERSION 2" portion sufficient? Second Observation Referring to sections 2 and 3 of the PSF License Version 2... Our non-open-source product will be a derived work, either by extending or embedding the python interpreter. According to section 3, we will briefly summarize these modifications to the python interpreter as these relate to our product. Good. Section 2 says that we (as Licensee of the original python) have to include without our modified python a copy of the license. The License explicitly states in section 1 that it is between the PSF and the end user. At the moment, we are the end user. But when we sell our software as a derived work, our customer becomes the end user. So our customers are entering into a direct agreement with PSF. This indemnifies the PSF (sections 4,5,6,7) -- also good. But there is a side effect of section 2 that would seem to give our customers many rights ("to reproduce, analyze, test, perform and/or display publicly, prepare derivative works, distribute...") to the derived work we created. We would have a problem with our customers distributing our derivative work or preparing derivative works of our derivative work. We could of course apply our own restrictive license to things which are truly ours, but we cannot do this to the work derived from python because that would conflict with section 2 of the python license. Second Question Can we we prevent our commercial customers from freely redistributing or modifying our derived version of python? The answer seems like "no" from the License itself but "yes" from the layman's language. Of course, our lawyers only look at the license. Thank you for your time. Our goal is to understand and be good corporate citizens. We believe python would be a great benefit to our customers, and we are looking for a viable business model that allows that. Martitza -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
