Re: Debian and the PHP license

Ferenc Kovacs <tyra3l@gmail.com> wrote: > I've find it a bit disturbing, that ftpmasters can make a decision on legal > grounds(which is the probably the highest priority for debian as far as I'm > concerned), without any backing from debian-legal debian-legal has no authority to decide anything. It is just a mailing list. We can discuss things here day and night and ftp-masters can ignore it. With that said, debian-legal can be useful when issues are clear-cut. For example, if someone asks if the Apache 2.0 license is compatible with the GPL (no for GPL 2.0, yes for GPL 3.0). Think of debian-legal as the secretary for ftp-masters. We can sometimes divine what they are thinking, but the final word belongs to ftp-masters. In any case, in the interest of making this email constructive, my take on the PHP license is that it does need to be fixed. From ftp-masters REJECT-FAQ, they also think so. So my advice would be to just use a well known, existing license and be done with it. Judging from the existing PHP license, the closest thing would be the 3 clause BSD license http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause Apache 2.0 would also be a good choice. Now, I understand that changing licenses is a huge chore, and the benefits can sometimes be intangible. The main benefit is that you will never have to deal with us again ;) Cheers, Walter Landry wlandry@caltech.edu