Hey, Nils, I've got news for you. I've written 3 separate posts now which
were long and thoughtful, which quoted from the GPL, and which explained
to you and the rest of the community how you could deliver a proprietary
solution to a client which relied on a GPL'd object in zope.

But, I've deleted all three rather than send them. Why? Because, first, I
don't want to be the person who posted a cook-book recipie for
circumventing the intent of someone's license. Other people on this list
have alluded to how to do it, that's already plenty. Second, I find the
people who stand to benefit the most from such an explanation to be
overwhelmingly rude and hostile towards any suggestion that each developer
have the right to select their own distribution terms, and when given the
choice between pissing off some developers who release GPL'd code to help
some ingrates figure out workarounds OR letting the ingrates continue to
believe their utterly outrageous misinterpretations of the GPL, I'll
choose the second.

But to answer your post specifically, fine, Guido wants you to take his
code and turn it into commercial products. So do a number of other people.

Now, you need to come up with a reason for me why that means EVERYONE
should conduct themselves that way. That's what's being proposed here:
that no one ever write zope products and release them under the GPL.

Remember, no one is saying Zope should be GPL'd. Some are saying they'd
like to distribute their modules and add-ons under the GPL. So, one side
of the debate says "no, no one should use the GPL for any code that will
run on a zope machine" and the other says "everyone should be free to
select the license that they like best for the code that they distribute."

Why does this debate even occupy anyone's time? It seems such a simple
question. If someone posts a module that is GPL'd either a) use it and
accept that that entails or b) don't use it, re-write it, whatever. I
can't understand why there's a c) adopt as some sort of Zope-Community-Law
that Thy Shalt Not Copyleft Things. Again, it only makes sense if you
think people will STILL write the code but just release it under the more
liberal license. I submit that that's not true.

If I was advocating the complete and total re-licensing of everything on
zope.org under the GPL, yes, you'd have a point, Guido and others clearly
are happy to let their code become parts of commercial products. But what
I advocate respects their wishes, and further respects other peoples'
wishes too: people with a different viewpoint. Each consultant out there
can pick and choose among the code available and if they want to shun
GPL'd modules, great. That's a far better way to go then telling people
not to write them in the first place, thank you very much.

jim

On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Nils Kassube wrote:

> Jim Hebert wrote:
> 
> > Look, I'm the last person on earth to say the GPL is perfect, or is the
> > one true license, or anything else. I've heard a number of GOOD arguments
> > in a number of venues about why the GPL may not be the best choice in that
> > setting.
> 
> From:
> 
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-09-07-011-21-OS-CY-SW
> 
> --cut--
> LT: From your viewpoint, should the differences between your licenses
> and the GPL attract or deter developers? 
> 
> GVR: Both. It may deter GPL hardliners (but there seem to be few of
> these in the Python world). But it attracts developers from the
> proprietary world like I mentioned above. Many of these "proprietary"
> companies are major contributors to Python and other open source
> products. For example the new Unicode support and regular expression
> engine, as well as several existing core library modules, were
> contributed by people who also develop proprietary Python software
> --cut--
> 
> > But this thread boils down to a bunch of people who want to sell a
> > solution which includes work other than their own, receive all the money
> > from the sale, bar the client from getting other 3rd parties to help
> > them improve what they paid for, and further have a legal monopoly on
> > distributing that solution to any additional people.
> 
> Looks like these people displaying "utter bald-faced greed and 
> ingratitude" by developing proprietary software based on open
> source products are important to Guido van Rossum. 


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