[Zope] Zope and the GPL poison pill

[Andrew Kenneth Milton]

+-------[ Dario Lopez-Kästen ]----------------------
| 
| >From: "Toby Dickenson" <mbel44@dial.pipex.net>
| > If that is your motivation then you may find that you get *more* back
| > by not using the GPL. My contributions to Zope (both personal and on
| > company time) are fairly significant in total, and would not have
| > happened if Zope was under a GPL license.
| >
| 
| but is that because you personally don't like/endorse the GPL for
| what-ever-reason or is it because the GPL actually prevents this? and if so,
| could you please elaborate?

There are a variety of reasons.

First and foremost is that the GPL is not corporate friendly, which means
that larger corporations are unlikely to take on GPLd products in any form.
Unlikely does not mean impossible, but until the NASDAQ picks up again, I
would say most people will be wary of non-commercial friendly products.

So if you have something useful, then what will probably happen is
said corporation will likely throw money at it and reimplement it,
market it better, and make proprietary changes and move on. This has
already happened with a BSD licensed product (the license was incidental,
but, it did happen). This can happen to any Open Source product.

The second reason is that GPL attracts fanatics. Just look at any
discussion forums where the issue comes up. You cannot have a calm discussion
and mention the GPL. 

I have already seen one GPL project have to re-license its code to a 
company who despite the ranting of some and the calm assurances of others
was not convinced that they could even comply with the GPL.

The oft-quoted reason for GPLing code is to protect code from being
'made proprietary.' Well noone can do that anyway, because you own it.
Mainly people GPL their code to stop other people making money from it 
(that's why RMS invented it in the first place d8) It should be noted that
large projects are effectively proprietary anyway because of their size,
(see Mozilla, and how long it's taken for any serious action).

Here are some large, non-GPL products that are thriving.

Apache -- BSD licence, several commercial versions around. It's hurt
apache how? Well it hasn't, they in fact have received funding from
IBM and others, and actually have bleeding edge Java support provided
by corporations.

X11 -- BSD license, several commercial versions around. Same deal, they
get funding from large vendors to provide features etc.

*BSD -- BSD license, Apple took Net/FreeBSD code for Darwin, and has
contributed changes back to the relevant codebases, and have released
Darwin as an open source Operating System (not required by BSD license).
BSDI acquired Walnut Creek and FreeBSD, changes are being merged across
from BSDI to FreeBSD.

Mozilla -- MPL license. 

Zope -- ZPL license.

Perl -- Artistic License (GPL - controversial bits).

While the GPL guarantees that other people's code will also be open
source, it doesn't guarantee that they will contribute those changes to
you (i.e. stop forks 150 Linux distros can't be wrong). 
The BSD code doesn't prevent this either (OpenBSD anyone?). MPL does.

It always amuses me that the GPL zealots who deride any and all licenses
that are not GPL, continue to use the TCP/IP code pilferred from *BSD,
use Apache, and use openssh which doesn't seem to have any license d8)
They also proudly use Netscape which doesn't come with source at all.

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