[Info-vax] Python and various libraries updated

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/8/2020 12:30 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> =?UTF-8?Q?Jan-Erik_S=c3=b6derholm?=  <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
>> Maybe it is simply that the goal for VSI is not to contribute to the
>> open soure world as such, just to provide their customers access to
>> some open source tools that might be of value (to the customers).
> 
> The thing is that many open source licenses -require- that any changes
> or additions to their code be made available in source form.  Not all
> of them do, but the gnu license definitely does.
> 
> So if VSI were to port, say, gcc to VMS, any changes they made to the gcc
> code as part of that port need to be made generally available under the gpl
> since gcc is licensed under the gpl.
> 
>> I'm perfectly fine with that, *I* will never read any source code
>> for Python, or any other open source tool...
>>
>> I feel somewhat guilty for this discussion since I asked about the
>> Python 3 ports... Sorry about that. :-)
> 
> Now, Python is licensed under a BSD-style license, which means that if VSI
> makes changes to the code to built it under VMS, they do not need to release
> those changes in source form, nor do they need to make their port available
> to the general public.  So if VSI doesn't want to release source for their
> port, they are perfectly within their rights to do that.
> 
> But not all open source code is like that.

Correct.

But there is a middle ground between strong copyleft and permissive
licenses: weak copyleft.

LGPL etc. ensure that modifications get released without creating
the mixing with closed source problems as GPL etc. does.

Also most projects under permissive license are pretty
good at keeping the source code available. If the master
source code repository is on Github, then everything
should be fine.

Arne