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How Python grew from a language to a community

An upcoming documentary recounts how Python went from a group of developers collaborating to having its own foundation (and user conference).

The world was moving all around them, and van Rossum wrote that “Eventually, in early 2000, the dot-com boom, which hadn’t quite collapsed yet, convinced me and three other members of the CNRI Python team (Warsaw, Jeremy Hylton and Fred Drake) to join BeOpen.com, a California startup that was recruiting open source developers.” And to this day, van Rossum wrote in 2019, “Only slight modifications were made to the text of the license to reflect the two successive changes of ownership, first BeOpen.com and then the Python Software Foundation, but in essence the handiwork of CNRI’s lawyers still stands.” Specifically, Zope had already been consulting the FSF, the OSI and the Software Freedom Law Center, and all those people,” Everitt remembers, “just understanding the legal regime of open source” — from copyright, to joint ownership rights, patent clauses, and contributor agreements.

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