Re: Licensing question

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Andrey Hristov wrote: > a small licensing question. Is it only forbidden to have extensions in PECL that > link to GPL or it's not possible at all to have PHP extensions (even not hosted > in PECL) that link to GPL code , and there is no exception in the license of > the code (like with mysql). If the extension can *only* work by being linked to a GPL'ed library, then yes, you can't do it. If however linking to the GPL'ed library is an optional thing and the extension can work by being linked to a non-GPL'ed library then simply tell people to use the non-GPL'ed library and you are fine. The problem with an extension that has no purpose other than linking against a GPL'ed library is that although we are not violating the GPL because we don't distribute a binary that is already linked, we are distributing something which encourages people to violate the GPL. Libraries shouldn't be GPL'ed anyway. Talk to the author and ask him/her to switch to the LGPL at least. -Rasmus