[Zope3-dev] Re: [Checkins] SVN: lovely.rating/ Initial import from Lovely Systems repository

[Martijn Faassen]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 August 2006 09:18, Benji York wrote:
>> That's seems to me to be an over-simplification, but I'd like to hear
>> what the ZF board has to say on the issue.
> 
> The ZF board should not deal with development decisions. This was my main 
> concern about the ZF from the first meeting on. It is a matter to decide 
> among the Zope developers. It would be totally wrong if the board could make 
> decisions like that.

I agree the ZF board should not deal with development decisions. This 
will be the purview of the Zope Management Organisation. Jim and I are 
in a committee to look into how this is all going to work and people are 
welcome to join this committee to help us flesh things out. This is up 
to the community to figure out and we do not want to get into the way of 
the community. The intent of the ZF is to support the community of 
developers and users of the Zope platform, after all.

The intellectual property policy is somewhat separate from development 
decisions however, though of course it affects them. Affects in setting 
constraints, but does not *make*.

The intent, as I understand it, of the intellectual property policy is 
to safeguard that the codebase managed by the ZF is usable under clear 
and uniform license provisions, so that users of this codebase have 
clarity and know this codebase has a clear copyright status and a clear 
licensing status.

The ZF intellectual property policy (not yet operative, in my 
understanding), here:

http://www.zope.org/foundation/ZopeFoundation_IP_Policy_v7.pdf

says the following:

"2.1.2. In no circumstance will the Zope Foundation accept or distribute
contributions or Content under licenses or associated terms and 
conditions that assert “copyleft” provisions on derivative works. This 
includes but is not limited to the GNU General Public License (GPL)."

The question is whether this contribution "asserts a "copyleft" 
provision on derivative works". When used with the underlying GPL 
dependency, my understanding is that it does, indirectly. So how to read 
this text? Is this is an "associated term or condition"? Only if the 
user actually installs the GPL-ed component it depends on. Perhaps this 
is one of those grey areas that would make me very happy if I were an 
intellectual property lawyer? :) What do you think?

Regards,

Martijn