Lamson 1.0 Released (a Python SMTP server by Zed Shaw) | Hacker News Reader

Lamson 1.0 Released (a Python SMTP server by Zed Shaw)

sheddingbikes.com

50 pointsbillpaetzke32 comments

I am the person Zed is talking about. I am not sure what Zed heard/read, but it seems clear that he is taking something out of context. Of course the GPL applies to Python. It goes just as far as copyright does... which is just not as far as some people think and assert that it does.

There is real danger in pushing the bounds of copyright, even if it is for a good purpose. We need less intellectual property right now, not more.

Actually, Van, I was being a dick. I went back and read it and I am very sorry for saying that. I've since rewritten it to not be so critical and harsh toward you.

My apologies:

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1274557940.html

This is why we all love you, you asshole.

I generally prefer people who consider their words, and hold some back.

EAFP

http://eafp.org/ ?

But you must be referring to the phrase "easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." I'm not sure exception-handling theory applies to human discourse.

I was going to say that the phrase pre-dates exception-handling theory and therefore must be originally about human discourse, but I checked wikiquote and it's attributed to Grace Hopper. Now I've got no idea what it was about!

Van, nothing personal (because you are an awesome nice guy), but it was your statements at the last PyCon that you believe the GPL doesn't apply to Python because of the concept of "linking". Several times you said this, and it's been repeated and now becoming a standard belief. It was reinforced in your lightning talk:

http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1374/pycon-2010-plenar...

At 8:08 where you plainly get how include files work wrong, and then attempt to equate that to how Python works, but you ran out of time. That combined with your previous statements regarding linking seems to have people thinking Python is not "linking" and therefore doesn't follow the GPL.

This belief is now permeating the Python community and I think it shouldn't. The last thing I want is Python being known as the GPL violation language, which would set a very dangerous trend among dynamic languages potentially giving companies another reason not to use them for fear of being "delinked" by them.

I'm not saying it's your fault, but it's a general belief that's now supported by your statements which I feel are actually entirely wrong.

Now, if you are saying here you didn't say that, then please, write a blog post that I can "link" to clarifying things so that I can get people to stop thinking that using Python you somehow magically get around the GPL.

Of course, your statements didn't make me change the license, that was more I'm bored with Lamson and just want people to use it now and quit bugging me about it.

Hmm, I will have to go back and review what I said to see if I misspoke. The basic issue is that open source licenses are copyright licenses, and so their enforceability is tied to the scope of copyright. The scope of copyright as applied to software is not at all clear, despite what anyone will tell you. And, probably not surprisingly, a lot of the ambiguity around the scope of copyright comes from the use of interfaces, APIs, and methods of linking. Python, like any dynamic language, is fuzzy around the boundaries here.

There are so many square pegs and round holes that anytime someone says something is "clearly" a derivative work, that person is almost certainly incorrect. The concepts of copyright were never meant to apply directly to software, and the law doesn't work the way people frequently intuitively think it does.

The problem is that applying copyright (and patent, but thats another story) restrictions to software has broad implications for what you can do with the software. This isn't just a practical issue; it is a freedom issue in the Free Software sense. I see so many bogus claims each day about IP that I have become very wary of its scope.

For example, a couple years ago Blizzard was able to get an injunction against another company because the other company sold a program that scripted Blizzard's software. No modification, just GUI automation. I was horrified, and disagreed, but they were able to put together a winning argument.

I unabashedly advocate boundaries on copyright. I think authors should say where they consider their code to end, and other code to begin. I think those boundaries should be reasonable within the scope of the law. I think this principle applies even (or especially) when it is free or open source software.

There's no end to the questions raised: http://jacobian.org/writing/gpl-questions/

…and no answers for them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702369

You might be interested in the following discussion and reference:

http://www.law.washington.edu/lct/swp/Law/derivative.html

Perhaps you should also post some link to an article where you explain this some more. It's the first time I hear Python is somehow special in regard to GPL.

Stop responding to polemics, jesus.

Lamson still drops email that it can't transcode, rather than preserve the octets from the wire. Shaw is on record as believing this is acceptable behavior. Please make sure your users agree before you run it.

Any links to how and why it does this? Lamson looked like something I might have a use for, but that sounded a bit scary.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658267 where he asks in english not whether this fails (he already knows it does) but how often

http://lamsonproject.org/docs/unicode_encoding_and_decoding....

Email is infrastructure software and some of the MTAs that are 10+ years old still don't do it well enough. Wrap Postfix, Exim or Qmail with your own business-logic interface and sleep well at night.

So change the code.

He did it so all the rest of Lamson could assume any message can be represented by Unicode strings. I think it would take a rewrite and I doubt he would merge the changes. And like MySQL, I would never fully trust the system, knowing what I do of the authors' priorities.

Link to the actual project web site (nowhere to be found): http://lamsonproject.org/

Why did he cave in to all the license talk and release it as BSD ?

If he really doesn't care and has now some more interesting C++ project why not leave the license to GPL and be done with it ?

If he really doesn't care and has now some more interesting C++ project why not leave the license to GPL and be done with it ?

Be reasonable. Who would read a blog post about that?

I decided that since I haven't worked on Lamson for a while, and I'm kind of bored with it, that I'd rather have people use it without having to constantly bug me about the GPL.

If you think about it from a marketing perspective, trying to "sell" GPL software to Python is like trying to sell Internet Explorer to a Linux long beard. Not only do they not want it, but they hate it and will look for anyway around it.

I got another project I'm working on that is going to come out AGPL soon and I'll see how that goes.

You are right; much of the python community dislikes the GPL (myself included) but I don't know of widespread "how the hell do we get around it" disease. Most of us just see GPLed code, shrug, and move on.

You seem to be making it out like people within the community are hell bent on screwing people who release software into the wild as open source, which bothers me a bit.

Or better yet MIT

From the perspective of someone releasing software, the BSD license is almost always more desirable. It's basically the MIT license with the added restriction that someone can't use your name without your permission.

Believe me, it can and does happen. Especially when you consult, people may try to use your hard-earned prestige to puff up their product's perceived value.

Agreed. This is precisely the reason I release most of my code under the BSD license. I'm happy for other people to use my code, modify it to suit their needs, and embed it in larger projects with more restrictive licenses, but I emphatically do not want them putting my name on it.

I prefer zlib license[1] just because of that. I'm fine with other people using my code. But keep my name clean. It also also haves quite simple and easy to understand language and no extraneous capitals.

[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/zlib-license.html

I don't mean to be contentious, but it doesn't seem to include the clause the BSD license includes.

From the BSD license: “Neither the name of the <ORGANIZATION> nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.”

I don't think the zlib license has an equivalent restriction? I don't see anything that protects the author or the organization funding the author from misrepresentation.

To give a clear example of what this clause presents, I have a friend who wrote a open-sourced library that a company used a few years ago. The founder of that company ran around using his name “Lots of people are excited about our product! We've got a lot of software engineers doing pro-bono work for it, such as <FRIENDNAME>.”

Obviously, this is disingenuous and potentially damaging to someone's representation, but it's not strictly forbidden by most licenses. What's nice about having your license explicitly forbid this practice is that if the user does this, they void the license and it is relatively easy to get them to stop using your library and really firmly disassociate yourself with the organization, should you choose to.

Even with Zed's changes to the text, I'm completely baffled by what he says about some people allegedly thinking that "Python delinks".

First he links to some blog post where someone threw out 20 questions about the GPL, and got approximately a million comments. I read about half way through the comments before losing the will to live, and didn't see anyone claiming anything like "Python delinks". (I also searched for the bizarre word "delink"; it isn't there.)

Then he links to Van Lindberg's lightning talk, where he does not by any possible stretch of the imagination say or imply or suggest or support anything even slightly like "Python delinks". He hardly gets as far as mentioning Python in his five minutes. I have no idea how anyone's belief that "Python delinks", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, could be "reinforced" by anything he said.

I also asked Google about <<<python delink>>> and it didn't turn up anything remotely like what Zed appears to be talking about.

It's hard to be sure, though, because Zed never actually says what this weird belief is that he's commenting on. "Python delinks", "the GPL doesn't apply to Python" -- I'm pretty sure no one with a brain has said either of those crazy things, so what is this belief that he's caricaturing and disagreeing with? Zed never says.

(He does go on to make a positive claim about what the GPL allegedly means for Python software, namely that if you write something that can optionally use something GPLed to provide an extra feature it wouldn't otherwise have, then you have to release it under the GPL. I think that's debatable, but in any case disagreeing with it is not at all the same thing as saying that "the GPL doesn't apply to Python" or that "Python delinks".)

He's already apologized for the comments he made towards VanL. Your comment has little value to distinguish itself from what is already in the thread. Please stop doing your part to fan the flames.

Eh?

1. The comments I'm remarking on are in Zed's article after his changes.

2. It's not "the comments he made towards VanL" that bother me, apart from his claim (which is still there) that somehow VanL's lightning talk encouraged the idea that "Python delinks". What's lacking isn't an apology but an explanation.

3. I think what I said differs from other comments in the discussion here in both content and emphasis. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

4. I have no intention of fanning any flames. What I want is to understand what Zed is saying, which at the moment doesn't seem to make much sense.

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