Microsoft Ships Python Code... in 1996

*.pyc generally implies that the interpreter was still in place, rather than generating a native executable file.

I don't think the article was implying there was anything wrong with it. Just a curious tidbit that one of the first big companies to use production code in Python was Microsoft.

Also, programs written in Python are not subject to Python's licensing terms so there's no violation there. That would only happen if they modified the interpreter itself.

I think the point was that this was in 1996, long before Python entered mainstream use.