Re: [PHP4BETA] Re: [PHP3] Help craft PHP description

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Ron Chmara wrote: > Mark Maggelet wrote: > > > > what about mentioning Zend? Isn't this the main difference between 3 and 4? > > Zend's great, but we have to keep in mind that it's one of the first of _many_ > possible closed source plug-ins for PHP, no? Mentioning them by name might be > a bit unfair to the other closed-source competition.... It'd be Rasmus' call, > I guess. There's basically no single thing which is called 'Zend', but what people mean usually when they say 'Zend' is the Zend engine, which is opensource, and is the foundation for PHP 4.0 (it's not a plugin, and can't be replaced, except with a 100% compatible engine, which is unlikely to be written). Zend Technologies is the company that developed the Zend engine, and also develops additional software products, some of them are plugins to the Zend engine, and some of them are closed source. Finally, the decision for the description is made by the PHP group, largely inspired by the feedback from the community, and not by any single person. > Well, "free" has a whole range of problems associated with it. Not all PHP > work is free, and Zend certainly isn't fsf inspired... open source seems > to be the de-facto "standard" for expressing the kind of licensing that > most of PHP falls under, *but* then you'd need to add that certain portions > are not open source....hm. The PHP license itself is in fact not an FSF-friendly license, as it's a BSD style license. I don't accept the FSF's ownership over the word 'free', though (it would be a funny contradiction), so I'm quite comfortable with saying that PHP is free, because it is. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/