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

umm.. that article is about MySQL

[joeldg]

Sheesh, that article is about MySQL's license which they had changed to not allow vendors to redistribute the server and the client.

php has it's license info here:
http://www.php.net/license/

Wrong.

[destiney]

Andi Gutmans is a co-founder of the Zend company, not PHP.

Rasmus Lerdorf is the founder of PHP.

Re:How do open source projects change lisences?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Many projects require that you turn over the copyright to your code when you submit it. Those projects do not need to contact submitters in order to change the license.

The copyright to ReiserFS, for example, is completely owned by the ReiserFS dude. He can ship it under whatever license he likes. One of those licenses is the GPL. If you receive it under the GPL, then you have all the rights guaranteed to you via the GPL, so you can *only* distribute it under the GPL. Because you don't own the copyright.

Linux, on the other hand, does not require submitters to turn over their copyright on their code submissions. If Linus wanted to release Linux under the BSD license, he would need permission from every single person that has their copyrighted code in Linux. He did this intentionally, as a guarantee that it would never happen.

The FSF does require copyright on all it's code, which means that if someone sued the billy-blue jeepers out of the FSF, in theory they could acquire the assets of the FSF, and release closed-source versions of Emacs or something. The FSF, however, has a greater standing should they ever go to court to enforce the GPL for one of their projects.

Of course, the kids at the FSF are pretty sharp. They may have some method of ensuring that their code will never fall into SCO's hands or something. Dunno.