Python gears up for 2.6 and 3.0

No, Roundup is Free Software. They wanted to use a proprietary solution (offered gratis by the
developers of that solution), but were asked to reconsider for a number of reasons; these
included the obvious publicity, advocacy and technical benefits related to using a Python
solution which is also Free Software, especially one which is regarded to be mature enough to
do the job.

The Python community does try and make its technology appealing to conservative software
development types, but I think it is often easy to overlook the potential for negative
publicity if such people then see that the developers producing the technology do not
themselves use that technology to manage the project itself (so you'd get Slashdot headlines
like "Python bug tracker uses closed, non-Python solution" and a hundred wisecracks following
up on it). At the very least, if you're producing Free Software and attempting to get
conservative people to use it, you should also send the signal that Free Software is good
enough for you too.

Had the previously favoured Java-based solution been Free Software, perhaps it would have been
an uncontroversial choice, since one can always say that the benefits of open solutions are
more important than technological details. There's no need to rewrite everything in one's
favourite language if the existing solutions are usable enough, but the availability of
suitable Free Software solutions in Python made it more likely that one of those solutions
would eventually be chosen.