Re: [PECL-DEV] Re: [PHP-QA] Debian and the PHP license

2014-07-29 Thread Rasmus Lerdorf 
On 07/29/2014 03:16 PM, Walter Landry wrote:
 Ferenc Kovacs tyr...@gmail.com wrote:
 I've find it a bit disturbing, that ftpmasters can make a decision on legal
 grounds(which is the probably the highest priority for debian as far as I'm
 concerned), without any backing from debian-legal
 
 debian-legal has no authority to decide anything.  It is just a
 mailing list.  We can discuss things here day and night and
 ftp-masters can ignore it.
 
 With that said, debian-legal can be useful when issues are clear-cut.
 For example, if someone asks if the Apache 2.0 license is compatible
 with the GPL (no for GPL 2.0, yes for GPL 3.0).  Think of debian-legal
 as the secretary for ftp-masters.  We can sometimes divine what they
 are thinking, but the final word belongs to ftp-masters.
 
 In any case, in the interest of making this email constructive, my
 take on the PHP license is that it does need to be fixed.  From
 ftp-masters REJECT-FAQ, they also think so.  So my advice would be to
 just use a well known, existing license and be done with it.  Judging
 from the existing PHP license, the closest thing would be the 3 clause
 BSD license
 
   http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause
 
 Apache 2.0 would also be a good choice.
 
 Now, I understand that changing licenses is a huge chore, and the
 benefits can sometimes be intangible.  The main benefit is that you
 will never have to deal with us again ;)

We will not be changing the license to Apache 2.0

I see absolutely no problem with PHP projects distributed from *.php.net
carrying the PHP license. The license talks about PHP Software which
we define as software you get from/via *.php.net. We support external
repos such as github, but they are still linked back to php.net via
their pecl.php.net entries, for example. For things that aren't
distributed via pecl.php.net, pear.php.net or www.php.net itself, I can
see the argument, but those are not projects we can do anything about.

-Rasmus


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Re: [PHP4BETA] License concerns

1999-07-20 Thread Rasmus Lerdorf 
 Btw I have another concern with the PHP4 licence itself:
 
   4. The PHP Group reserves the right to modify the PHP license at
  any time and without prior notice, as long as the changes keep
  the free and open source nature of PHP.
 
 does this mean rectroactively changing the license of already distributed
 copies of the software ? If yes, then it may clash with the open source
 definition (I'm expecting comments here from people who know DFSG issues
 more than me), if not, then this paragraph is not needed, since the
 copyright holder can change the license anyway.

This is not an attempt to be able to retroactively change the license.  My
view of this is that once a piece of software has been released under a
certain license you can't go back and change it.  This clause is an
attempt to be able to make minor license tweaks without having to get
approval from every one of the hundreds of people that have contributed to
PHP.  The wording may not be appropriate though.

-Rasmus

Re: [PHP4BETA] License concerns

1999-07-20 Thread Rasmus Lerdorf 
 The KDE licence will be compatible with QPL AFAIK (Knghtbrd worked a lot 
 on this with the KDE guys, hey, help us here, too :)). That doesn't make
 the QPL compatible with the GPL of gdbm.

The QPL and the GPL will never be compatible.  I don't really care though.
We don't distribute any GPL'ed stuff.

-Rasmus