I'm looking at using Zenphoto as part of a larger software project, and notice that it's published under Creative Commons licence.

This is a problem. CC licences are not compatible with the GPL and some other software licenses and may cause me and others legal difficulties later on (not least because the CC licence is also unported!)

Creative Commons do not recommend licensing software in this way. Is there a reason why Zenphoto has chosen a CC licence and not something more appropriate to the project?

See also the CC FAQ on this:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

Maybe look a bit closer. Zenphoto is not released (and was never) under a CC licence. It is released under GPL v2 as directly mentioned on the download page and our site's footer under "Licenses" (from 1.4.5 on it will be "GPL v2 or later" to be compatible with GPL v3). Also, that license is included in the download package within /doc_files and linked from the backend footer.

What is release under a CC license are the user guide articles which is also clearly noted below each article.

And, by the way, you are required to agree to as part of the install process. So I guess you gave up without even trying the software.

So the CC licence referring to "this work" at the bottom of the documentation is not in fact referring to the software. That's what had confused me.

And no, I had not tried the software, because I needed to consider the license first.

Yes. But I don't understand how you could have missed that on the download page.

The text we use on the user guide is the standard text from the CC site. Text is also "work" ;-) But we will make this more clear with the next update.

It may have been that the CC logo was more noticeable than the text link. I was less interested in the download link in any case, and more interested in things like software dependencies and licensing.

While it's also certainly thorough to clarify the copyright status of your documentation on each page, it's not a very common thing to do.