Re: Sources licensed under PHP License and not being PHP are not distributable

Steve,

I did hand checked all copyright files in question and while php-imlib might have slipped me, I am quite sure that your claim about "lot of these" is false, since php-imlib is not the only package under dual licensing I have seen.

I do apologize for filling bug against php-imlib though.

Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>

Knot DNS (https://www.knot-dns.cz/) – a high-performance DNS server

On 26. 6. 2014, at 19:29, Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 02:36:18PM +0300, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
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].

Furthermore, there are bugs in the actual MBF that's been filed here. Bug
#752639 was filed against php-imlib, which gives the PHP license as one of
*two* options under which the work can be distributed - LGPL is the other,
and is in practice the one that's in effect for Debian.

So I think we need a review here of the MBF methodology, because the
problems with the PHP License were already identified and worked through in
the archive a decade ago - so a lot of these bugs are probably false
positives.

--
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org

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