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

[Ricardo Newbery]

On Dec 21, 2007, at 9:48 PM, Alex Turner wrote:
>
> au contraire - it is the ZPL which is anti-sharing in my  
> estimation.  You do not have to contribute changes back to a  
> project which you extend in a BSD style license, so you can take a  
> BSD style licensed product, extend it, and sell it without giving a  
> single thing back to the original author of the original system  
> except a credit note in the copyright statement.
>
> BSD and ZPL is share and do what you like
> GPL is share and share alike
>
> Thats the core philosophy difference.  If you like others to share  
> too, then use GPL or LGPL (possibly AGPL actually, GPL doesn't  
> gaurentee much of anything for application service providers as  
> I've found out, which is probably most people using Plone etc.), if  
> you want to give your code away then use BSD/ZPL, if you want  
> changes back, then use AGPL.  And if you think it wont happen, it  
> already did.  Microsoft took the BSD Kerberos code and re-purposed  
> it into Windows, changed the protocol slightly and pissed off many  
> people.



I would be careful about using labels like "anti-sharing" to describe  
individual licenses.  As you acknowledged, both licenses are used to  
"share" software.  ZPL-shared software comes with few strings  
attached.  GPL-shared software comes the "share alike" string  
attached.  It's a bit of a semantic question which is more true to  
the spirit of *sharing* so I'm going skip that debate.

Chris McDonough didn't appear to label the GPL as "anti-sharing".  On  
the contrary, it's the existence of *both* licenses in the same  
community that he appears to describe as anti-sharing.  And since in  
the Zope community, the ZPL came first and is the core license, it's  
a legitimate complaint that it's the later adoption of a different  
license by a subcommunity that is the primary culprit.

Ric
(a licensing agnostic)