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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."'"
Now, can some one please paste what the PHP license is all about. Please understand that the lay-man might not easily understand legal terms, myself included.
This might have an obvious answer or something, but I just don't see it. I was under the impression that once you submit your code to an open source project, you're submitting it under the current lisence of the project. When a project changes it's lisence, do they need to contact everyone who has submitted code to the project and get permission to release under the new lisence? That doesn't sound like an easy task for some large projects, so I'm guessing that's not how it's done. Can someone clarify this for me?
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
Most of PHP's user base are people that are using PHP to make a living and they wouldn't care less
I doubt it. There is a huge non-profit/amateur base of users--look no further than the numerous php projects hosted on sourceforge.
How many major for-profit php apps can you name? Yes, many commercial sites use PHP. But a ton of noncommercial sites do too.
It is somewhat sad that the PHP developers don't see "the rest of us" as a significant portion of their user base, just as it was sad to see RMS not understand that his political message surrounding free software was turning many people off.
If it's too BSD-like, then this is a completely meaningless debate. CEO dude is right, PHP's users won't care. If it's too Sun-like, then there's something to talk about.
Oh. Here's what RMS says:That's still vague. What's the hiccup? It looks like RMS has no ideological problem with this license. Is there a new, worse license?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The problem is that ESR decided to go on a (particularly embarassing for the open source community, and not very diplomatically done) jihad to try to get Sun to open-source their Java implementation.
I think a lot more people are comfortable backing ESR than the rather-more-radical RMS.
So ESR's fans keep hammering on Sun.
In the case of Java, I think that it's even less of an issue than PHP, actually. Java was originally designed with the idea of many different VMs existing.
May we never see th
In the 80's, there was a GCC Public License, an Emacs Public License, and a GDB Public License. This made it awkward for people to mix the source code of these projects, so Stallman wrote a General Public License. The goal was to enable projects to share code. (remove the legal reading and interpretation and let hackers hack.)
Every now and again, someone who doesn't know the history, repeats it's mistakes.
Stallman asks people to use the GPL, but he doesn't take issue with people using other compatible licenses. He asks people to move to a compatible license - not necessarily the GPL - if their current license is incompatible. He's seen the problem, he's seen the solution, he tries to show people the two.
Another on-topic article is David Wheelers "Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else."
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If you want to control what happens to your code, you put restrictions to it. That removes freedom. Period. Get over it.
At the risk of being modded down (and I surely will be) FUCK you. I will not get over it. I don't want to control code that I license under the GPL - I want to make sure NO ONE controls it. I am really tired of hearing this stupid smear. It's exactly equivalent logically to saying "if you want true freedom, you've got to let someone else be a tyrant or else you're restricting their freedom."
If you want control over your code, choose a proprietary license. If you want someone else to eventually control your code, choose BSD. If you want no one to control your code ever, choose GPL.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
What you can't do, is redistribute it. The FreeBSD Java port (for example) requires you to download the source yourself, directly from SUN. I would like to see them remove this restriction and allow anyone to distribute unmodified copies of the source and binaries, and modified versions which pass compatibility tests.
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Why does this always come up? I in particular hate the extremists on both sides of the fence. Why must everything be GPL compatible? It is a rhetorical question.
I'll answer it anyway. The problem is that PHP is a programming language interpreter that is designed to integrate with database software. MySQL is database software, licensed under the GPL, that PHP can integrate with and which is the preferred database software of a very large percentage of PHP users.
The GPL incorporates a clause that states that if you link GPL code to any other code and distribute the result, you must license the other code under the GPL (or, equivalently, some license that contains no restrictions that the GPL doesn't). This applies even to dynamic linking.
PHP doesn't do this, so consequently, nobody can legally distribute a compiled copy of PHP with the MySQL module compiled in.
This is a big problem that must be solved one way or another. One side of the fence believes that PHP should drop all of their license restrictions that aren't in the GPL, the other believes that MySQL's client library (the portion of MySQL that needs to be linked with PHP) should be distributed under a license that doesn't contain the restriction I described above (e.g. the LGPL).
So far, there is no movement.