9 ms·

Debian and the PHP license

122 points by jpswade 12y ago

ecaron 12y ago
Another conversation along the similar vein of "Debian putting its foot down about a license" is Firefox (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...)
- timonovici 12y ago
  It's not that Debian lacks things to do, and they are being picky about the licenses: it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb, and then somebody like Debian has to untangle the mess they created.
  - dspillett 12y ago
    It isn't really that "someone like Debian has to" generally - Debian has to as a large part of their reason for existing is providing a stable, reliable, and predictable system: both in terms of content (code and other assets) and license to use said content. If they aren't picky about these things they are not staying true to their stated aims (and a number of their users would be unhappy).
  - eitland 12y ago
    > it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb Actually true. You will find competent developers who will change the license across their web app codebase from MIT to AGPL on a whim, saying AGPL is just the same as GPL. I find legal stuff seriously interesting but also seriously scary.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  Mozilla doesn't permit 3rd parties to make unapproved changes to their software and continue using their trademarks. It's in their trademark policy. Debian has a similar policy with respect to their trademarks. So, Debian created funnily named alternatives based on the code. All that made sense. What didn't make sense was all the people whining about Mozilla's policies and unironically complaining about how it restricted the Debian devs.
  - dspillett 12y ago
    The odd thing with that is that the problem became apparent, people discussed it, Mozilla didn't want to (or couldn't for some, presumably legal, reason) change policy, neither did Debian, sometime suggested the name change thing, both parties agreed that this was compatible with their policies, and so it happened. There was no drama between Firefox and Debian: just a problem, a discussion, and a solution. The way some people presented it as a pitched battle between the Firefox and Debian teams is silly. Both were protecting their standing in some way, both appreciated the other's position, and a solution was found that causes no problems for either of them (aside from a small amount of user training along the lines of "yeah, it is Firefox under a different name").
    - lambda 12y ago
      It's good that Google learned from this problem, and built a solution into their naming when releasing Chrome; the open source project is named Chromium, and is what distro versions can be named, and the official build from Google is named Chrome. It would be nice if Mozilla would follow suit, and come up with an official name for the open source project and community builds which is distinct from their official branded builds. Right now Debian uses "IceWeasel", GNU uses "IceCat", and other distros would have to come up with their own name if they made changes that were incompatible with Mozilla's trademark policy. On the other hand, in pretty much every repository, you find "Chromium", but if you instead download straight from Google you get "Chrome".
      - chimeracoder 12y ago
        Chromium and Chrome differ in a number of ways beyond the name and trademark, though. Iceweasel is literally just Firefox packaged for Debian, except with a different name and icon. I don't think there is any functional difference (beyond the normal distro-specific packaging that every distro does). Chromium lacks a number of features that Chrome has, because Chrome comes bundled with a bunch of proprietary components that will never be distributed with Chromium. A basic example is that Chromium cannot (without a patch) display PDFs in-browser, the way Chrome can. Chromium also cannot support Chromecast, or any of the many other Chrome-specific features, of which there are many[0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg (screenshot is from Firefox, but it illustrates how much Google focuses on Chrome-specific functionality.)
- Alupis 12y ago
  I'm glad Debian is putting their foot down on this issue. There are way too many careless and sometimes downright bad licenses floating around. I've seen, and argued against, people using the WTFPL before: http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ Some, even in projects that could be considered "serious" and reused in another project (I won't touch a WTFPL licenses project because to me, it's not a license and is way to legally ambiguous). I've seen way to many developers think they can write up some text and call it a license and it's "good". Not the case. Pick a real license that was written by lawyers and has well understood (and preferably previously challenged) legal ramifications.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    I don't see how "You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO" is ambiguous, legally or otherwise. That said, this would probably be better served with an explicit public-domain declaration or equivalent (like the CC0 license).
    - Alupis 12y ago
      It's ambiguous for several reasons. There's not much preventing me from re-assinging copyright to myself (in countries that allow it) and then suing the original creator. There's nothing to stop me from taking your code, re-licensing it under say a proprietary license, then suing the original creator. There's nothing that stops me from taking your project's branding/symbol/graphics/name and claiming it as my own and then suing you. There's nothing that stops me from taking your work and then not providing attribution back to the original creator. By default there is nothing that absolves the license holder from warranty nor implied fitness for use. (If it destroys my computer running your code, I can sue you, and worse, you accept liability by default). That is, unless you include the optional snippet of text that absolves any warranty issues... but since it's optional, and not on the main license page (it's in the FAQ page), many authors forget to include this. There are other things too... like, legally, what does "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT" actually mean? The law is black and white (or at least we try to be), being in the grey opens the door for abuse. Has it been challenged before in a legal sense? Has a lawyer reviewed it? While I certainly understand the intent and spirit of this license; this license appears to be nothing more than a bad (and somewhat distasteful) joke that serves more harm than good. I agree, better off choosing a public domain license or one of the several vetted FOSS licensees.
- asuffield 12y ago
  That's the other way around - Mozilla decided to start enforcing their trademark license more aggressively and told Debian to stop using the 'Firefox' trademark.
  - rockdoe 12y ago
    That's skipping a few steps :) Debian patched out some artwork because it didn't follow their license requirements, and the patches to remove the artwork ended up violating the trademark license. The trademark owner then did what trademark owners are required to do. As I stated above, the artwork is now free even by Debian guidelines, so the only thing holding back Debian there seems to be inertia.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Doesn't Debian also include backported security patches that aren't part of the upstream source?
      - rockdoe 12y ago
        Iceweasel is based on the officially supported Firefox versions, so upstream by definition has all the security patches.
        icebraining 12y ago
        The idea is that when a security bug is found, Mozilla writes a patch against the current Firefox version, but Debian must patch whatever version is the Debian Stable, so they must write a patch to the earlier version of the source. Since the code has changed in between, the patch is different, even if it fixes the same bug.
        rockdoe 12y ago
        Mozilla writes patches against all supported Firefox versions (that's what being supported means!), and as already stated, Debian only uses officially supported versions for Iceweasel. So no, there are never security patches that Debian needs to backport for stable because they are always already upstream.
- rockdoe 12y ago
  Apparently it's currently no longer needed, but making sure and dealing with the legalities is a sufficient drag that it's easier to live with the renaming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935
VLM 12y ago
TLDR is the license is specifically intentionally designed to only be applied to certain named products from exactly one named group of coders, but random internet people are applying it to random code written by random people. A bad HN automobile analogy would be if Ford had a clickwrap license on all new cars that summarized to "This Focus model car is provided by Ford, Ford wrote this Focus model car UI, Ford distributes this specific Ford Focus model, and you can officially do the FOSS thing with it, including Ford will not provide any guarantees". (note I'm guessing this isn't the real license on the ford focus UI, LOL, just a made up example) And then GM sells a car, lets say, the Buick LaCrosse, and for reasons of apparent insanity slaps the Ford license on their car. Next people are all WTF because GM released something under a license claiming that Ford owns it, wrote it, distributes it, and Ford won't provide guarantees (implying, I guess, that GM will). Can I legally resell a GM car that claims its owned by Ford? So who owns this "GM" car, and if the license slapped on it is literally nonsense, is it even legally licensed software? So you're trying to sell a LaCross under the Focus license, are you claiming this thing is actually a Focus or that GM is a division of Ford, or Ford won't provide warranty coverage so I guess its implied GM will. If the license claims this is owned by Ford, but I bought it from a GM dealer, who's permission do I need to ask to relicense if needed? If I intentionally violate the license, can GM sue me if in writing they claim Ford owns this software, not GM? Or if Ford wanted, just to be jerks, could they sue me for using this GM software, because after all the license says Ford owns it. If the software crashes and kills people is a license falsely claiming Ford owns it a legal liability for GM for defamation (Ford owns it, its their fault not ours)?
- angersock 12y ago
  Yours is a very interesting use of car analogy.
  - chris_wot 12y ago
    You can never have too many.
- thefreeman 12y ago
  I don't think that is really accurate. I think it is closer to: - Ford makes car, licenses under Ford license. - 3rd parties make add on products for the Ford automobile, like an updated radio, and say that it is licensed under the same license as the original car.
jessaustin 12y ago
Matthias Urlichs wins the thread: "I'd be for this [removing offending PHP modules] in a heartbeat if it would make people switch to a saner programming language, but that's wishful thinking."
- eitland 12y ago
  Hehe, anytime, just give us a language with the same features and the same ide support etc and I'll happily let you bring along your improved standard library, nicer syntax etc. I don't think most developers would miss the craziness, I don't think the features are tied to the craziness of the language and I'm sure a lot of us would change as soon as it became production ready (if not earlier.) (Hoping for Hack to be a step in the rigth direction.)
- wdewind 12y ago
  Please don't post this flame war stuff.
chris_wot 12y ago
What is the contradictory part of the license? And... What's the point if a license that contradicts itself? How on earth do they expect to enforce their conditions? It's things like this that make me think "what did we do to deserve PHP?"
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  It's not that the license is self-contradictory, it's that the license text (as written here: http://php.net/license/3_01.txt http://php.net/license/3_01.txt) implies that the software is distributed only by the PHP Group, and is therefore not usable without modification by anyone outside the PHP Group. The solution is simple: modify the text of your project's license to have similar clauses to the PHP license, but not mention the PHP Group, OR re-license your software under the BSD license or another, similar license.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    The solution is simple: modify the text of your project's license to have similar clauses to the PHP license, but not mention the PHP Group That's not so simple; as a work produced by someone, a legal document may be subject to copyright. So you might need a license to the license to modify and reuse it :) http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyright-violator/ http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyrig...
    - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
      Hmm... Is it possible to "self-host" a license? That is, is it possible to have a license licensed under itself?
      - icebraining 12y ago
        I don't know; and I'm not sure if anyone knows. As far as I know, there's no jurisprudence about the copyright of copyright licenses.
davidw 12y ago
My own small contribution to a Debian Licensing Hassle: http://lwn.net/1998/0611/ircii.html http://lwn.net/1998/0611/ircii.html I cold-called one of those guys and he was kind of amused by the whole thing. It was not much fun though.
bellerocky 12y ago
> It is clear, he said, that PHP doesn't care about the misuse of its license and the misusers don't understand that they are making a mistake. You could replace "license" with a lot of other words and it would still a possibly accurate statement. "mysql api" comes to mind, as well as "classes" and "URL query variables like $_GET"...
- jonursenbach 12y ago
  Oh, here we go again. This is unnecessary bashing.
rebolek 12y ago
So the PHP license is as good as PHP itself. What a surprise.
jpswade 12y ago
From time to time people raise concerns of using PEAR packages licensed under the PHP license in GPL'ed code. In a discussion about this topic, the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, issued the following statement: It all comes down to semantics of what linking means. The PHP license is pretty much identical to the Apache license and you could indeed make a case for not allowing any GPL'ed software to be "linked to" from Apache either. See http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1. The PHP license was chosen to match the Apache license because Apache and PHP are tied so closely to each other. This hair splitting over linking, derivation and aggregation has been going on since the beginning of time. My stance is that you can indeed ship PHP licensed PEAR components on the same cd or in the same tarball as GPL'ed code because I see it as an aggregate work. This changes if you take PEAR code, modify it and copy-paste it directly into your own work. Then it moves from aggregate to derived. But the intent of the PEAR components is to be used in aggregate form. The PHP license allows you to use it in derived form as well, of course, but then you should be choosing a license other than the GPL for the derived work. The FSF has a FAQ on aggregation here: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggre... That text is heavily biased towards compiled software and they talk about executables and memory spaces which don't really apply in this case. If you don't consider using a PEAR component as aggregation then it logically follows that you also cannot have Apache call your code so you will have to stipulate that nobody can use your code from Apache. I think this is an extreme interpretation that pretty much nobody out there shares. In short, I don't see an issue here. Move along. For PECL extensions that are linked into PHP, the license must be compatible with the PHP license. That means you can not GPL a PECL extension or you would be violating the GPL. Note also that if you write an extension that links against a GPL'ed library you will be violating the GPL. If you need to link against a GPL'ed library, get permission from the author of the library to use the library under a compatible license. The license of any PEAR/PECL package can be found in the head of all source code files, inside the <license> tag of the package description file (package.xml) and also on the package homepage.
- dethstar 12y ago
  But this isn't about linking issues. This is about distribution issues.
mangecoeur 12y ago
Not directly relevant, but is it me is is lwn.net one of the ugliest sites ever. practically anything, including dropping all the formatting altogether, would make it look better. In that vein, I think I've identified a CS-specific visual syndrome that makes CS people always choose a bizarre shade of salmon pink for everything. See aforementioned lwn sidebar, and other exhibits http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html http://www.lyx.org/images/about/main_window.png http://www.lyx.org/images/about/main_window.png (there are others i can't be bothered finding right now, apache foundation has a number of gems, and more that have thankfully been redesigned in the last few years)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Big surprise: distribution that actually cares about user freedom and therefore licensing has issues with crappily written or inappropriately used licenses. Another big surprise: issue most users don't give a flying duck about, lingers on for several years or perhaps forever. The world goes about its business, and continues using PHP.

122 points by jpswade 12y ago

Another conversation along the similar vein of "Debian putting its foot down about a license" is Firefox (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...)

timonovici 12y ago
It's not that Debian lacks things to do, and they are being picky about the licenses: it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb, and then somebody like Debian has to untangle the mess they created.
- dspillett 12y ago
  It isn't really that "someone like Debian has to" generally - Debian has to as a large part of their reason for existing is providing a stable, reliable, and predictable system: both in terms of content (code and other assets) and license to use said content. If they aren't picky about these things they are not staying true to their stated aims (and a number of their users would be unhappy).
- eitland 12y ago
  > it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb Actually true. You will find competent developers who will change the license across their web app codebase from MIT to AGPL on a whim, saying AGPL is just the same as GPL. I find legal stuff seriously interesting but also seriously scary.
JohnTHaller 12y ago
Mozilla doesn't permit 3rd parties to make unapproved changes to their software and continue using their trademarks. It's in their trademark policy. Debian has a similar policy with respect to their trademarks. So, Debian created funnily named alternatives based on the code. All that made sense. What didn't make sense was all the people whining about Mozilla's policies and unironically complaining about how it restricted the Debian devs.
- dspillett 12y ago
  The odd thing with that is that the problem became apparent, people discussed it, Mozilla didn't want to (or couldn't for some, presumably legal, reason) change policy, neither did Debian, sometime suggested the name change thing, both parties agreed that this was compatible with their policies, and so it happened. There was no drama between Firefox and Debian: just a problem, a discussion, and a solution. The way some people presented it as a pitched battle between the Firefox and Debian teams is silly. Both were protecting their standing in some way, both appreciated the other's position, and a solution was found that causes no problems for either of them (aside from a small amount of user training along the lines of "yeah, it is Firefox under a different name").
  - lambda 12y ago
    It's good that Google learned from this problem, and built a solution into their naming when releasing Chrome; the open source project is named Chromium, and is what distro versions can be named, and the official build from Google is named Chrome. It would be nice if Mozilla would follow suit, and come up with an official name for the open source project and community builds which is distinct from their official branded builds. Right now Debian uses "IceWeasel", GNU uses "IceCat", and other distros would have to come up with their own name if they made changes that were incompatible with Mozilla's trademark policy. On the other hand, in pretty much every repository, you find "Chromium", but if you instead download straight from Google you get "Chrome".
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      Chromium and Chrome differ in a number of ways beyond the name and trademark, though. Iceweasel is literally just Firefox packaged for Debian, except with a different name and icon. I don't think there is any functional difference (beyond the normal distro-specific packaging that every distro does). Chromium lacks a number of features that Chrome has, because Chrome comes bundled with a bunch of proprietary components that will never be distributed with Chromium. A basic example is that Chromium cannot (without a patch) display PDFs in-browser, the way Chrome can. Chromium also cannot support Chromecast, or any of the many other Chrome-specific features, of which there are many[0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg (screenshot is from Firefox, but it illustrates how much Google focuses on Chrome-specific functionality.)
Alupis 12y ago
I'm glad Debian is putting their foot down on this issue. There are way too many careless and sometimes downright bad licenses floating around. I've seen, and argued against, people using the WTFPL before: http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ Some, even in projects that could be considered "serious" and reused in another project (I won't touch a WTFPL licenses project because to me, it's not a license and is way to legally ambiguous). I've seen way to many developers think they can write up some text and call it a license and it's "good". Not the case. Pick a real license that was written by lawyers and has well understood (and preferably previously challenged) legal ramifications.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  I don't see how "You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO" is ambiguous, legally or otherwise. That said, this would probably be better served with an explicit public-domain declaration or equivalent (like the CC0 license).
  - Alupis 12y ago
    It's ambiguous for several reasons. There's not much preventing me from re-assinging copyright to myself (in countries that allow it) and then suing the original creator. There's nothing to stop me from taking your code, re-licensing it under say a proprietary license, then suing the original creator. There's nothing that stops me from taking your project's branding/symbol/graphics/name and claiming it as my own and then suing you. There's nothing that stops me from taking your work and then not providing attribution back to the original creator. By default there is nothing that absolves the license holder from warranty nor implied fitness for use. (If it destroys my computer running your code, I can sue you, and worse, you accept liability by default). That is, unless you include the optional snippet of text that absolves any warranty issues... but since it's optional, and not on the main license page (it's in the FAQ page), many authors forget to include this. There are other things too... like, legally, what does "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT" actually mean? The law is black and white (or at least we try to be), being in the grey opens the door for abuse. Has it been challenged before in a legal sense? Has a lawyer reviewed it? While I certainly understand the intent and spirit of this license; this license appears to be nothing more than a bad (and somewhat distasteful) joke that serves more harm than good. I agree, better off choosing a public domain license or one of the several vetted FOSS licensees.
asuffield 12y ago
That's the other way around - Mozilla decided to start enforcing their trademark license more aggressively and told Debian to stop using the 'Firefox' trademark.
- rockdoe 12y ago
  That's skipping a few steps :) Debian patched out some artwork because it didn't follow their license requirements, and the patches to remove the artwork ended up violating the trademark license. The trademark owner then did what trademark owners are required to do. As I stated above, the artwork is now free even by Debian guidelines, so the only thing holding back Debian there seems to be inertia.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Doesn't Debian also include backported security patches that aren't part of the upstream source?
    - rockdoe 12y ago
      Iceweasel is based on the officially supported Firefox versions, so upstream by definition has all the security patches.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        The idea is that when a security bug is found, Mozilla writes a patch against the current Firefox version, but Debian must patch whatever version is the Debian Stable, so they must write a patch to the earlier version of the source. Since the code has changed in between, the patch is different, even if it fixes the same bug.
        rockdoe 12y ago
        Mozilla writes patches against all supported Firefox versions (that's what being supported means!), and as already stated, Debian only uses officially supported versions for Iceweasel. So no, there are never security patches that Debian needs to backport for stable because they are always already upstream.
rockdoe 12y ago
Apparently it's currently no longer needed, but making sure and dealing with the legalities is a sufficient drag that it's easier to live with the renaming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935

VLM 12y ago

TLDR is the license is specifically intentionally designed to only be applied to certain named products from exactly one named group of coders, but random internet people are applying it to random code written by random people. A bad HN automobile analogy would be if Ford had a clickwrap license on all new cars that summarized to "This Focus model car is provided by Ford, Ford wrote this Focus model car UI, Ford distributes this specific Ford Focus model, and you can officially do the FOSS thing with it, including Ford will not provide any guarantees". (note I'm guessing this isn't the real license on the ford focus UI, LOL, just a made up example) And then GM sells a car, lets say, the Buick LaCrosse, and for reasons of apparent insanity slaps the Ford license on their car. Next people are all WTF because GM released something under a license claiming that Ford owns it, wrote it, distributes it, and Ford won't provide guarantees (implying, I guess, that GM will). Can I legally resell a GM car that claims its owned by Ford? So who owns this "GM" car, and if the license slapped on it is literally nonsense, is it even legally licensed software? So you're trying to sell a LaCross under the Focus license, are you claiming this thing is actually a Focus or that GM is a division of Ford, or Ford won't provide warranty coverage so I guess its implied GM will. If the license claims this is owned by Ford, but I bought it from a GM dealer, who's permission do I need to ask to relicense if needed? If I intentionally violate the license, can GM sue me if in writing they claim Ford owns this software, not GM? Or if Ford wanted, just to be jerks, could they sue me for using this GM software, because after all the license says Ford owns it. If the software crashes and kills people is a license falsely claiming Ford owns it a legal liability for GM for defamation (Ford owns it, its their fault not ours)?

angersock 12y ago
Yours is a very interesting use of car analogy.
- chris_wot 12y ago
  You can never have too many.
thefreeman 12y ago
I don't think that is really accurate. I think it is closer to: - Ford makes car, licenses under Ford license. - 3rd parties make add on products for the Ford automobile, like an updated radio, and say that it is licensed under the same license as the original car.

jessaustin 12y ago

Matthias Urlichs wins the thread: "I'd be for this [removing offending PHP modules] in a heartbeat if it would make people switch to a saner programming language, but that's wishful thinking."

eitland 12y ago
Hehe, anytime, just give us a language with the same features and the same ide support etc and I'll happily let you bring along your improved standard library, nicer syntax etc. I don't think most developers would miss the craziness, I don't think the features are tied to the craziness of the language and I'm sure a lot of us would change as soon as it became production ready (if not earlier.) (Hoping for Hack to be a step in the rigth direction.)
wdewind 12y ago
Please don't post this flame war stuff.

chris_wot 12y ago

What is the contradictory part of the license? And... What's the point if a license that contradicts itself? How on earth do they expect to enforce their conditions? It's things like this that make me think "what did we do to deserve PHP?"

TallGuyShort 12y ago
It's not that the license is self-contradictory, it's that the license text (as written here: http://php.net/license/3_01.txt http://php.net/license/3_01.txt) implies that the software is distributed only by the PHP Group, and is therefore not usable without modification by anyone outside the PHP Group. The solution is simple: modify the text of your project's license to have similar clauses to the PHP license, but not mention the PHP Group, OR re-license your software under the BSD license or another, similar license.
- icebraining 12y ago
  The solution is simple: modify the text of your project's license to have similar clauses to the PHP license, but not mention the PHP Group That's not so simple; as a work produced by someone, a legal document may be subject to copyright. So you might need a license to the license to modify and reuse it :) http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyright-violator/ http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyrig...
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    Hmm... Is it possible to "self-host" a license? That is, is it possible to have a license licensed under itself?
    - icebraining 12y ago
      I don't know; and I'm not sure if anyone knows. As far as I know, there's no jurisprudence about the copyright of copyright licenses.

davidw 12y ago

My own small contribution to a Debian Licensing Hassle: http://lwn.net/1998/0611/ircii.html http://lwn.net/1998/0611/ircii.html I cold-called one of those guys and he was kind of amused by the whole thing. It was not much fun though.

bellerocky 12y ago

> It is clear, he said, that PHP doesn't care about the misuse of its license and the misusers don't understand that they are making a mistake. You could replace "license" with a lot of other words and it would still a possibly accurate statement. "mysql api" comes to mind, as well as "classes" and "URL query variables like $_GET"...

jonursenbach 12y ago
Oh, here we go again. This is unnecessary bashing.

rebolek 12y ago

So the PHP license is as good as PHP itself. What a surprise.

jpswade 12y ago

From time to time people raise concerns of using PEAR packages licensed under the PHP license in GPL'ed code. In a discussion about this topic, the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, issued the following statement: It all comes down to semantics of what linking means. The PHP license is pretty much identical to the Apache license and you could indeed make a case for not allowing any GPL'ed software to be "linked to" from Apache either. See http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1. The PHP license was chosen to match the Apache license because Apache and PHP are tied so closely to each other. This hair splitting over linking, derivation and aggregation has been going on since the beginning of time. My stance is that you can indeed ship PHP licensed PEAR components on the same cd or in the same tarball as GPL'ed code because I see it as an aggregate work. This changes if you take PEAR code, modify it and copy-paste it directly into your own work. Then it moves from aggregate to derived. But the intent of the PEAR components is to be used in aggregate form. The PHP license allows you to use it in derived form as well, of course, but then you should be choosing a license other than the GPL for the derived work. The FSF has a FAQ on aggregation here: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggre... That text is heavily biased towards compiled software and they talk about executables and memory spaces which don't really apply in this case. If you don't consider using a PEAR component as aggregation then it logically follows that you also cannot have Apache call your code so you will have to stipulate that nobody can use your code from Apache. I think this is an extreme interpretation that pretty much nobody out there shares. In short, I don't see an issue here. Move along. For PECL extensions that are linked into PHP, the license must be compatible with the PHP license. That means you can not GPL a PECL extension or you would be violating the GPL. Note also that if you write an extension that links against a GPL'ed library you will be violating the GPL. If you need to link against a GPL'ed library, get permission from the author of the library to use the library under a compatible license. The license of any PEAR/PECL package can be found in the head of all source code files, inside the <license> tag of the package description file (package.xml) and also on the package homepage.

dethstar 12y ago
But this isn't about linking issues. This is about distribution issues.

mangecoeur 12y ago

Not directly relevant, but is it me is is lwn.net one of the ugliest sites ever. practically anything, including dropping all the formatting altogether, would make it look better. In that vein, I think I've identified a CS-specific visual syndrome that makes CS people always choose a bizarre shade of salmon pink for everything. See aforementioned lwn sidebar, and other exhibits http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html http://www.lyx.org/images/about/main_window.png http://www.lyx.org/images/about/main_window.png (there are others i can't be bothered finding right now, apache foundation has a number of gems, and more that have thankfully been redesigned in the last few years)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 12y ago
>Big surprise: distribution that actually cares about user freedom and therefore licensing has issues with crappily written or inappropriately used licenses. Another big surprise: issue most users don't give a flying duck about, lingers on for several years or perhaps forever. The world goes about its business, and continues using PHP.