Re: FYI: Zope Public License 1.1 vague, contradictory, and not DFSG-free

[John Galt <galt@inconnu.isu.edu>]

This is interesting in a weird sort of way.  If we're going to let
copyrighted licenses stand in our way, I guess cut-n-pasting parts of the
GPL for use in discussion is out too.  So far the consensus has been that
copyrighting a license is a no-op, since you can't copyright a contract.
As for the rest, the ZPL is a trivial rewrite of the 4 clause BSDL (which
may have some repercussions if Zope were ever to press the issue of
infringement on the license itself above and beyond the absurdity of a
contract being copyrighted), and the extra clause is debatable WRT DFSG
4, which I note is already being done.  Basically, this whole part of the
argument is a large no-op, and really shouldn't have been brought up in
the first place unless you think it's time to consider the copyright on
licenses as a valid thing in determining the DFSG-freeness or worth of
inclusion in Debian of the program covered, in which case I say "cry havoc
and loose the dogs of war".

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Branden Robinson wrote:

>First, the license text itself:
>
>"Copyright (c) Zope Corporation. All rights reserved."
>
>If that refers to the text of the license itself, I may be violating the
>license on the license text itself by quoting it for critical purposed.
>Of course, in a society where Fair Use is recognized, that's not the
>case, but I'm not sure the United States is such a society these days.
>However, that's beyond the scope of this mail.

-- 
EMACS == Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

Who is John Galt?  galt@inconnu.isu.edu, that's who!