Yeah, this makes me suspicious. I suspect that if there can be multiple GED instances per process that this could instead be a class method, and `_GED_INSTANCE` would just be `self`.

``` python
class GED(object):
    """
    wording
    """"

    def open(self,  file_name, dbtype=DBType.DB, existing_only=True):
        """
        :param existing_only: does stuff specifically x
        """
        ...
```

(Note that this is different from a function decorated as a static method of a class.)