I personally do not have a problem with the Zope license. However, I do use a lot of GPLed software and appreciate it. I also am appreciative of the ability to use Zope and to take advantage of the wonderful work that DC has produced. When the original debate occurred I was in support of DC maintaining some type of button crediting DC. DC has provided us with an incredible tool and has provided the community with tools in which to have a community and contribute toward Zope. Whatever license is chosen I would like to see it be one which protects everybody, especially DC. About a year or two ago Lutris, the people who do Enhydra, were debating about how to license their product XMLC. After researching the idea they decided, with the communities support, to adopt the GPL. Their primary reason was to prevent a bigger fish (with $$$) from capitalizing on their work and possibly inhibiting their ability to compete. The GPL would protect DC from predatory competitors. It would also allow for Zope's adoption in certain environments. I also believe some people would relicense their products to the GPL if it were Zope's native license. The source code maintains DC's intellectual credit and investment in Zope. Zope.org could also possibly provide a higher profile for DC without necessarily being "obnoxious" or being overtly/overly possessive. I've made some statements about how the GPL can help DC and the community. What I don't see is if or what negatives would come into play with such a change. Does anybody see any problems? Does anyone at DC including Hadar and their new VC friends? Jimmie Houchin Paul Everitt wrote:

Some quick points on this.

First, feel free to talk on this list about ways that Zope developers can license their stuff. It's a constructive discussion, and since I'm not a Zope developer, I can ignore it. :^)

Second, regarding the licensing of Zope itself, ChrisP is right that I'm the guy on that. Or more specifically, Hadar Pedhazur (our board chairman) and I run the zope-license email alias. He and I had previously decided that, after the round closed, we'd take a fresh look at our licensing strategy.

Basically, we'd like to get out of the business of having our own license, and we're open to the idea of a license that is more GPL-friendly, in the spirit of Apache, Python, etc.

Thus, continue discussing what you need to do your jobs and give us some time to hash out a proposal. Thanks!

--Paul

On 14 Nov 2000 09:29:11 -0800 Simon Michael <simon@joyful.com> wrote:

...

Juan, thanks for shining some light towards this murky area. Maybe ZWiki and other zope products need to be LGPL or dual-licensed, maybe the zope license can use some refinement. I for one won't know without seeing some enlightened discussion of the issue.

This stuff is unsexy but important.

Best regards, -Simon

In article <3A1309A4.3410C1F6@texoma.net>, Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin@texoma.net> wrote:

...

The GPL would protect DC from predatory competitors. It would also allow for Zope's adoption in certain environments. I also believe some people

And prevent it in others.

...

would relicense their products to the GPL if it were Zope's native license.

While other products would suddently become license-incompatible.

I'm not going to talk now about the Zope license, as Paul requested; by the way, thanks Paul for your message, it has been hopefully. Instead I'll show my rationale to decide with which license I release my software. As Jimmie I also like copyleft licenses because they protect my work. But the GPL is not the only copyleft license, the LGPL is too, are there more copyleft licenses? The GPL-incompatibility issue is a GPL issue, one way to avoid it is not to use it. But the GPL is a widely used license, so it's important for me not to release software with a GPL-incompatible license. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't want to write my own license nor modify an existing one. For now I'll stay with the LGPL beacuse it's copyleft and doesn't has the incompatibility problems of the GPL. There're other issues like dual-licensing or the possibly outdated concept of library that the LGPL uses, but I wanted to keep this message as short and clear as possible to show the fundamental issues that are important for me: GPL-Compatibility and copyleft. regards, jdavid