[Zope] Re: ZPL and GPL: What should one consider when choosing a license?

[Ross Patterson]

Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> writes:

> On Dec 21, 2007, at 3:53 PM, Ross Patterson wrote:
>>
>> Unfortunately, the comment by Chris McDonough mentioned in the latter
>> doesn't seem to be accessible any more.  I'd love to read it.
>
> It said:
>
> """
> I don't think Plone is "bad" because it uses the GPL. I do think it's
> a pain in the balls to have to ask authors of various GPL things if
> they're willing to relicense ZPL or other BSD-type license in order to
> be able to incorporate their software into CMF or Zope (as required by
> the ZC contributor's agreement in order to check it into either of
> those projects). It just puts up a big enough impediment to sharing
> code that the codebases don't intermingle much.
> What's gauche about using the GPL is that at least by default, the
> Plone guys don't need to ask the Zope guys if they can ship their
> software. They get the benefit (or pain ;-) of shipping it all without
> any extra work. But the Zope guys need to go track down the copyright
> owners of various bits of Plone code and get all of their permissions
> to ship their software in CMF or Zope via a relicense. That's just
> hurts collaboration badly. It's anti-sharing which I think is
> practically just gauche.
> """

Thanks for digging that up, its a really good point to have in the mix
here.

> Now I've gotta run out of here before a licensing discussion breaks
> out. ;-)

I suppose this topic is just too volatile, but it would be great to have
some documentation somewhere for developers like myself who don't really
have strongly formed opinions or practices on licensing.  I'd love to
have a page I can go to, read the facts, a sampling of the opinions, all
provided just for the purposes of giving developers a resource for
making their own decision.

Ross