Re: Legal solution: RE: [PHP-DEV] Non-GPL readline

At 18:55 15/1/2001, Stig Venaas wrote:

If our extension is written to support a non-GPL readline clone (say a BSD licensed one), and it then accidentally works with the GNU readline shared library, that can't be our problem, or?

Of course not. GNU cloned tons of commercial UNIX applications and libraries, it doesn't mean that suddenly everything has to succumb to the terms of GNU...

I guess it's not that simple, just a thought.

It actually is pretty much that simple, if such a clone exists. The thing is this. By releasing PHP 4.0 with the readline extension, we are *not* violating any licenses. If we're not naive, however, we can clearly say that we're encouraging, or at least enabling our end users to violate the license. Again, we're not actually breaking any law or violating any license. One could argue, and with a great deal of truth, that we're just pretending to be innocent, while we're well aware of the fact we're encouraging others to violate the license. So, this is all a matter of perception, whether we're willing to stick to the dry law and play dumb, or, prevent our users from doing bad stuff by not including the readline extension in (actually, destroying it from the face of the earth, distribution has nothing to do with it). However, if your code is compatible with a GNU library, which is, in turn, compatible with some other library (commercial, BSD) that is legal to link with PHP, then things change. Obviously, this all story about encouraging the users to break the license is no longer relevant, and the whole bogus-to-begin-with story of not allowing to release code that is 'compatible with a certain library' becomes rediculous. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO & co-founder, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/