[Zope-dev] Re: ZPL and GPL licensing issues

[Morten W. Petersen]

On 22 Jun 2001, Simon Michael wrote:

> Shane Hathaway <shane@digicool.com> writes:
> >> One of the consequences being that someone re-distributing zope &
> >> zwiki together, under their default licenses, is technically in
> >> violation right now, I think we are all agreeing.
> > 
> > Technically yes, although I like to think that the product developers
> > implicitly grant redistribution permission by attempting to apply the
> > GPL.
> 
> I'm not sure that would be a valid assumption. Speaking for myself, it
> wasn't my particular intention to unconditionally grant that
> permission given the licenses as they stand. I mean, I didn't intend
> that zwiki's GPL be some kind of watered-down GPL. :)

May Stallman forgive me (fun intended :-):

"""
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 16:43:05 -0600 (MDT)
From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
To: morten@thingamy.net
Subject: Re: Mixing different licences
 
    Another question is whether or not it's legal to use GPL-ed Zope
    products with Zope.
 
That is a hard question.  I don't know whether Zope is just an interpreter
or contains facilities that, in effect, the user program links with.
It makes a difference.
 
If the former, you can run programs on Zope regardless of their
licenses.
 
If the latter, then in general, you can't take someone's GPL-covered
code and combine it with Zope, because the Zope license is
GPL-incompatible.
 
If someone wrote a GPL-covered program specifically for Zope, you are
pretty safe taking that as implicit permission to combine it with
Zope.  But it would be better for them to give explicit permission.
"""

Implicitly yours,

Morten