PHP Not Moving To The GPL

darthcamaro writes "In an article on InternetNews.com, PHP co-founder Andi Gutmans takes a small shot at RMS (and the FSF), labelling them as fanatics and as not being representative of PHP's user base. 'Most of PHP's user base are people that are using PHP to make a living and they wouldn't care less. "They are just happy that it's a PHP license and they can do whatever they want with it and can ship it with their commercial products," he said.' The comments were made in the context of the recent MySQL LGPL to GPL licesing problem which is what the article is really about. '"We definitely don't see eye to eye on the issue of licensing. He [Richard Stallman] doesn't like our licensing and we know that," Gutmans said. "We're aware of each other, but the PHP project has no intention of moving to some sort of GPL license."'"

Comments

Re:How many licenses can fit on the head of a pin?

[yanestra]

it looks to me like the crux of the issue is that the devlopers of PHP don't like being told what 'free' means

Or, is it simply that you cannot live with other people having different opionions and different imagionations of what "free" should mean?

Re:Hypocrites

[dfghjk]

What is your point exactly? That somehow everyone owes your their work released under the GPL because someone else released code under the GPL? How do you know they developed their work using GPL'ed software and what difference should that make? Who's the hypocrite here?

Some people aren't silver-spooners like RMS and have actually had to work for a wage in order to live. It's easy to take a radical position when you've never needed to earn a paycheck in your life.

Re:Dictionary shows GPL is less free (as in freedo

[Quattro Vezina]

Your definition of "freedom" is self serving and wrong. Given two licenses the one with the fewer strings is the more free, i.e. GPL is the less free of the two.

Bull. Let's use an analogy of countries to compare the BSD License and the GPL...

- The BSD License is like a country where the government is forbidden from infringing on the people's freedoms, and turns a blind eye to its citizens committing violence against other citizens, claiming that if it arrests criminals, it's infringing on the people's freedoms.

- The GPL is like a country where people are free to do whatever they like, as long as they don't infringe on other people's freedoms, commit violence against other people, etc. It knows that the only way to protect freedom is to punish those who infringe on the rights of others.

In other words, the GPL is like a modern, Western-style democracy, where freedoms are protected from all forms of attack (at least in theory--implementations aren't perfect), and the BSD license is like pure anarchy.