Re: Licensing of things within PEAR

Stig, First I will say that if PEAR is PHP4 license minus the Zend clause I am not sure if it is or is not GPL compatiable w/o rereading the license. Assuming it not compatiable I think you would have a GPL violation. (though I suppose there is room for debate) I would considering doing say include(/path/to/pear/DB.php); as NOT being a runtime activity. This is because really its appending it to your code as it goes through. Though RMS would be the authority as to whether this is the case or not. Derek Neighbors GNU Enterprise http://www.gnue.org derek@gnue.org Stig S. Bakken wrote:

Derek, Are you suggesting that "include"ing PHP-licensed code (at run time) from GPL'ed code violates the GPL? - Stig "Derek A. Neighbors" wrote:

Stig, I have not checked but if the PHP4 license is not GPL compatiable basically you are saying anyone wishing to use your PEAR library can not make their work GPL. That sounds like an awful big mistake to make. MySQL, Mozilla, StarOffice and Qt all learned this the hard way. Derek Neighbors GNU Enterprise http://www.gnue.org derek@gnue.org Stig S. Bakken wrote:

"Derek A. Neighbors" wrote:

Seeing this little debate made me wonder the following? What license are the classes in PEAR? (I assume they are under the PHP license) but did not see a LICENSE or COPYING file in the PEAR directory. If in fact it is under the PHP License are all contributions forced to use this license? Example: I have the my kickbutt class. I licensed it under the GPL and distributed to several other repositories and now want it to be in the PEAR repository. Must I either dual license it or change the license? or will every class have the license it author desires. If the latter how will you manage this and whom has copyright to what as people continue to improve on the works of others in a significant way?

PEAR has room for different licenses, but stuff that does not share PHP's license is best distributed separately. - Stig