Use ZK in commercial product without open our code?

asked 2008-10-03 15:59:35 +0800

lendle
213 ● 3

Hello,

ZK is marvelous, but GPL seems confusing.
My company wants to develop a server application based on zk and many other open source components. Most of these open source components are licensed under apache or BSD-style license. We don't want to open our code and we don't want to distribute our product under GPL-license.
However, since our company is really in very small scale, the annually commercial license is not affordable to our company.

My question is, if we distribute our product (not in GPL, of course) without any zk jars (but we certainly have some jsp pages written with zk's jsp tag) and require our
customer to download and install zk by themselves (with our support, possibly), is this legal?

Furthermore, one of my friend, who is a lawyer in software area, once told me that since GPL is too confusing, we should avoid to use any GPL-licensed component in any
commercial or non-commercial product (since GPL may conflict with many many other licenses). Does zk have any plan (or will) to use LGPL instead? I'm not malicious, just
curious about this.

By the way, thanks to the zk-team, zk is really a very good project.