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

How do open source projects change lisences?

[OutRigged]

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?

Re:How do open source projects change lisences?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, here's an example:

XMB [eXtreme Message Board] - URL

Originally began under a BSD license. Developers quit. New guy, Richard, took over and changed the license without consulting anyone to a proprietary license for 1.6. No previous developers were consulted regarding the change. New branches started from the 1.5 source, since it was BSD, but any attempts to release the code were met with legal threats from Richard and Aventure Media . The only notable exception is previous developers started their own forum from the 1.5 code but it went no where. No one has ever defied Aventure Media and released a competing project based off earlier code for fear of legal costs. This is a free forum -- no profit is made. No one can afford to have a legal battle over it, so they move on. (Which is why XMB is losing developers and is fading away, especially in comparison to other superior forum projects [like this].)

Changing the license is probably illegal, but Richard argued that the code was submitted to XMB as a project, and thus was property of whomever ran the project, which was now him. Is this right? Probably not. Can anyone do anything about it? Not without spending money on a product that makes no money. When a project manager screws around with things like licensing, it's best to walk away.

Why GPL compatible is good:

[ciaran_o_riordan]

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."