Re: Concerning the licensing of PHP Snippets in comments

Hi Edward, > It appears that comments submitted to the PHP Manual become property of > the PHP Documentation group. I am currently submitting a patch to > MediaWiki concerning magic_quotes cleaning, and the patch is based upon > a comment on this page: > http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.get-magic-quotes-gpc.php > The > relevant bugzilla entry is: > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4381 > > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, one of the primary developers of the > application, brought up licensing issues about the derivation from the > code. I believe the comments are covered under the same license as the > PHP manual is, and that it is largely compatible with the GPL. However, > section VI is being invoked, which, according to the page > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html makes them > incompatible. > At this point, I am not a copyright lawyer, so I could not figure out > whether or not it would be proper to use even a heavily modified work > from the PHP manual. > > What is the licensing of the code snippets in the comments of the PHP > manual, and are they compatible with the GNU GPL? Thanks. As our note submission page states, the notes are considered property of the documentation group (this only means that we are not crediting submitters whose notes are integrated into the manual). All submitted notes are under the same license as the manual for the very same reason. Whether our license is GPL compatible is a good question. You can look for some analysis on the net. Since the documentation is licensed as content, not as source code, it is not really straigforward to compare the documentation license with the GPL. Regards, Gabor Hojtsy