On 26 Jun 2001 10:29:39 +1000, Anthony Baxter wrote:
Michael "R." Bernstein wrote Unless I've misunderstood something (which is certainly possible), DC doesn't seem to have anything to lose by switching from a BSD style license to the GPL (or a GPL style license with an additional optional attribution clause), and quite a bit to gain.
They will probably lose developer mindshare. Given how important this is to Zope's growth (and to DC's growth, as a result), this is far far more important than the karma from switching to the far less flexible GPL
You're right. I hadn't considered that the ZPL needs to be 'proprietary compatible' so far as add-on products are concerned. perhaps the LGPL would suffice, as that would permit creating proprietary Zope products. But I won't be entirely happy if the ZPL permits proprietary third-party redistributions of Zope itself.
Your argument seems to be that DC would want to control other companies ability to make distributions derived from Zope - unless they've been hiding this nefarious plan from the community, this doesn't seem to be an objective for them.
Heh. I guess I shouldn't have stuck that in there. An argument I've occasionally heard for BSD-style licenses is that the original (usually corporate) author wants to be able to make proprietary releases based on other peoples contributions. The argument for NPL-style licenses is that they (the original author) want to be the *only* one with such a privileged position. DC has never indicated that either of these was important to them.
As far as a contributor to Zope wanting to keep their work free, then if the ZPL is GPL compatible, they can make their components GPLd.
True. Michael Bernstein.