Re: license chaos, PHP vs GPL

On 14.02.2008, at 17:09, till wrote:

From the little I understand about licenses, BSD and GPL get along much better, correct? The complications come from the PHP license (PEAR, Net_SMTP, DB) and GPL license (which is RoundCube). RoundCube's install practice pretty much follows the (infamous) "unzip & go" approach (well, "unzip, edit two config files & go"), which is also why we bundle all dependencies.

Well I guess the main reasons why the PHP license is GPL incompatible are points inside the PHP license that are irrelevant to PHP. So maybe we really do need our own license.

My second question is - is it generally discouraged to bundle PEAR packages? I've never heard of that and see it as common practice in a lot of OSS which relies on packages from PEAR. But someone raised their concerns that this is the case.

Its common practice indeed. And there is generally nothing fundamentally wrong with that. I guess Greg has been trying to promote however, that such copies would be shipped with a PEAR registry, so that users could easily upgrade those packages. regards, Lukas