Zimbra should have a new License

[theo]

Hi all,

There is quite a while since i heard about zimbra now. I never installed it yet, but i followed closely the news and the forum from time to time.

Don't get me wrong, I think Zimbra is great - probably the best webmail ever - but i can't help thinking that something is not right : The license.


What wrong with the license ?

Well from my point of view many things :

• Yet another license. There are a lot of licenses out there. One per proprietary software and tenth for all free software.Sad thing is that people don't read licenses (especially eulas). Most of free software users know at least that there is two main freesoftware categories : copyleft and non copyleft, and they know GNU/GPL for the first one and 3-clause-bsd licence (or X11 licence) for the other one.
  Now after reading YPL, i don't really see a big difference with the GNU/GPL (v2 at least). So why not using it ? You may also be interested in the new AGPL especially designed for networking software and stuff, like zimbra.
• YPL have a Scary clause : "6.2 - In the event Yahoo! determines that You have breached this Agreement, Yahoo! may terminate this Agreement." Here no need to see any judges ? So Yahoo can terminate this Agreement whenever he likes it ?
• Compatibility : Yahoo! Public License is probably[1] not compatible with the gpl, so this would prevent people to try integration of zimbra and lot of free software. (Something like more than 50% of free software is GPL, more are GPL compatible).
• Can't be included in lot of distributions : As it non free (IMHO), zimbra won't be included in all distributions that emphasis free software (Debian, fedora, opensuse, ...). That's a very bad thing for them, cause zimbra is, IMHO, the best webmail. That's a bad thing for zimbra cause it could help it being as popular as it deserves.

For all these reasons i think that zombra deserve another license.

Plese let me know what you think. Am I totally misleading ? Do you think i brought an interesting point ?

Thanks for reading my post.

[1] Various Licenses and Comments about Them - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

[dwmtractor]

This is an old debate and if you search around the forum you will find a variety of opinions on it. However there is a certain amount of "lawyers will be lawyers" that goes with a commercial enterprise, and my own experience is that lawyers are only swayed by polls if they're running for office. . .

To your point about "can't be included in a lot of distributions" though, I think you may be missing the purpose of Zimbra. It's an email SERVER, not a client package, and as such it's unlikely to be packaged with a distro anyhow. There's a bit too much that needs to be configured for a proper Zimbra server to work (DNS or even split DNS and domain name, for starters) to make it practical to include it in a server distro IMHO.

Sure, lots of us would like an even "freer" license, and the debate is always welcome on this forum (unlike some), but life being what it is, I would not hold my breath for a change for the reasons you stated. License changes, if and when they happen, will be the result of corporate decisions, I would guess.

Cheers,

Dan