Re: PHP License Questions

Hello Andrew, first of all I am not an authority on PHP licenses but I do have a law degree so I can offer my interpretation : On Oct 3, 2004, at 9:08 PM, Andrew Lindeman wrote:

A member of the GNU Savannah development team (i.e. a reputable source) recently mentioned that the GPL was incompatible with the PHP license (verified by http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses ) and that using code under the PHP license in a GPL'ed piece of software could not mesh.

I didn't know that, but the links is fairly self explanatory. They consider it incompatible, fair enough but there is a way out..

This is one of his quotes as to the conflict (referring to the PHP license): "ah, I would guess the advertising clause, that and how it's not definitive enough with your rights." I know that the PHP license is basically a BSD license with a few clauses about the 'PHP' name, so this confuses me. I'm also extremely confused because I *know* many GPL'ed pieces of software use PEAR libraries under the PHP license. Is this just a matter of no enforcement or is he mistaken? If he's mistaken, can someone elaborate so I can refute his argument? It would be a matter of non application, enforcement never happens anyway in licensing unless we are

talking about *big* players aka an entity willing to spend thousands of dollars to litigate in court. Now, from a legal standpoint even if is the PHP license is incompatible you can distribute the final product under GPL without altering the DB or Calendar license. For instance, the Apache license is not compatible but you can have a linux distribution which includes both the GPL'd kernel and Apache. The problem of mixing licenses occurs *only* if you take DB, change it, and want to distribute it under GPL. Imagine, if this wouldn't be true you couldn't run any GPL'd code together with non GPL components on the same computer, and this is certainly not the case. If you don't alter DB and Calendar this doesn't apply to you. It doesn't create any legal problem to have a GPL package which uses non GPL'd components which are left as they are. You might specify in your software licensing that this is the case. If you use to specify the license on the top of each source file, as the common practice, you don't actually need to do anything because both DB and Calendar have the licensing specifications well outlined. If the really don't let you include DB and Calendar in the above mentioned fashion you can simply specify in the README that your package requires the installation of DB and Calendar via the Pear Installer. Last but not least, if they still insist, why are they distributing PHP together with the "GNU" linux distribution of Debian ? ;) If is not compatible.... Cheers David Costa