On 06/26/14 14:00, Ondřej Surý wrote:
I should have done this earlier before cloning the bugs, so here's some more background on the bugs filled. I did have a quite long and extensive chat with FTP Masters and our conclusion was that PHP License (any version) is suitable only for software that comes directly from "PHP Group", that basically means only PHP (src:php5) itself.
Could you elaborate on the reasoning of that? Neither your email to -devel nor the one to -legal[1] explains why you think so and whatever it is, I think it's far from obvious. I think an outcome that results in a mass (RC) bug filing needs to be better documented than that -- and btw, you're supposed to mail debian-devel *before* you do so, not after; cf. developer's reference 7.1.1.
Besides the importance of the bug filing itself and removing half of PHP from Debian (including packages such as php-memcached!), I have another point to make: as you're well aware, we're in the progress of packaging Facebook's HHVM, which is a new runtime engine for PHP that is gaining some popularity[2].
HHVM is heavily based on PHP and both the parts that are forked from PHP and the parts that were originally written by Facebook (e.g. the VM engine) are licensed either under the PHP 3.01 or the Zend 2.00 licenses.
Facebook's lawyers clearly think it's okay, and I do too, FWIW. They do avoid direct and indirect GPL dependencies of course, but I frankly can't see why the PHP license here would be problematic.
Regards, Faidon 1: <1401193085.24090.121958581.5B64CBA4@webmail.messagingengine.com>2: We intend of switching Wikimedia's infrastructure to HHVM in the upcoming quarter, for instance.