Re: License changes

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Oct 20, 2005, at 1:14 PM, Clay Loveless wrote:

andrew morton (drewish@katherinehouse.com) wrote:

Have there been any updates on the discussions with the PHP Group about adjusting the PHP license?

I may have missed this discussion, but why are we even considering bothering with this (if we are, that is)? It's the right thing to do, regardless of what you think about Debian, it's packaging system, or it's developers. The license is a grant of legal rights to the code you release, and if it's terms are nonsensical, you are limiting the legal right for people to use and distribute that code. This is counter to the whole point of FOSS.

To even consider jumping through hoops to let a package system package our package system is pretty silly. Debian users who want to use PEAR should be very familiar with the concept of a package manager: let them use the pear command-line tool. It's not jumping through hoops, it's fixing something that's broken. License clauses that are nonsensical or don't apply are just as wrong as unused or inapplicable code in a PEAR package. However, we seem to have much better peer review for the latter than for the former.

This is an acknowledged problem, and is going to get fixed one way or the other - either a PEAR license, a PHP license that can be used for PHP projects, or dropping the PHP license from the acceptable licenses for PEAR packages.

Installing PEAR packages with apt-get? .... Why would you? Convenience and scalabililty. If every collection of packages or libraries (Python libs, PERL's CPAN, etc) had their own update method, things would rapidly spiral out of control to the point of unmaintainability. It's easy enough to forget to apply a security update, and would be even more so if you had to check many different sources for that information, and follow a different procedure for each one.

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