Re: Proposal for license change

On Wed, 2014-04-02 at 05:27 +0700, musicdenotation@gmail.com wrote: > > Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor may > "PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission from > group@php.net. You may indicate that your software works in > conjunction with PHP by saying "Foo for PHP" instead of calling it > "PHP Foo" or "phpfoo" > I propose removing this clause from the PHP license for GPL > compatibility. My proposal is to make PHP a trademark (as Python is), > because trademark law is intended to deal exactly with this issue. I'm > completely happy with the current license, but I propose this as an > improvement. It is not that trivial. A few quick thoughts: * Getting a trademark for three letters isn't trivial, most trademark authorities limit those to few cases like BMW or SAP. We could probably prove PHP's relevance but still effort * Unlike Python we have no legal entity which could own it. We could only register it to a natural person (i.e. Rasmus) * We have no fundings to finance the registration (registration fees, lawyer to do the bureaucracy etc) * The thing with GPL compatibility is partly a religious thing -- Mind GPL's virality: If one component is GPL all other parts become GPL, too. So if we'd lateron start bundling GPL code we are on a sword's edge of becoming GPL. This becomes really complicated with extensions for commercial libraries. Some contributors also have stronger objections to GPL. * We make use of other components which probably aren't GPL-compatible licensed either, see i.e. php-src/main/spprintf.c * Such a drastic change might require collecting permission from all past contributors. Some of them are hard to reach. johannes