Re: Contributing code

On Thu, 2002-11-28 at 14:56, Edin Kadribasic wrote: > >As I mentioned in my other mail, I'm against banning GPL code. It > would > >be a very very bad sign to the Open Source Community if PEAR says > "GPL > >code is not allowed in here" (I can already hear the outcry, even > if most > >(99.9% :) ) of the packages will not be GPL or be changed to LGPL > if we > >ask the author gently). > > FSF sends a bad signal to opensource community by saying that Apache > and PHP licenses are non-GPL compatible, meaning linking against > them is not allowed. This means that PHP cannot use samba libraries > for instance. Taken from the GPL FAQ (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html): If a programming language interpreter is released under the GPL, does that mean programs written to be interpreted by it must be under GPL-compatible licenses? When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is no. The interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; a free software license like the GPL, based on copyright law, cannot limit what data you use the interpreter on. You can run it on any data (interpreted program), any way you like, and there are no requirements about licensing that data to anyone. However, when the interpreter is extended to provide "bindings" to other facilities (often, but not necessarily, libraries), the interpreted program is effectively linked to the facilities it uses through these bindings. So if these facilities are released under the GPL, the interpreted program that uses them must be released in a GPL-compatible way. The JNI or Java Native Interface is an example of such a facility; libraries that are accessed in this way are linked dynamically with the Java programs that call them. Another similar and very common case is to provide libraries with the interpreter which are themselves interpreted. For instance, Perl comes with many Perl modules, and a Java implementation comes with many Java classes. These libraries and the programs that call them are always dynamically linked together. A consequence is that if you choose to use GPL'd Perl modules or Java classes in your program, you must release the program in a GPL-compatible way, regardless of the license used in the Perl or Java interpreter that the combined Perl or Java program will run on. This does not describe the scenario of a non-GPL-compatible program using GPL'ed libraries, but what I can read from this is that having GPL'ed modules in PEAR is asking for trouble. We can point fingers as much as we like to, but we can not have GPL'ed code in PEAR as long as the PHP license is not GPL-compatible. - Stig