hi Walter,
On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 9:16 PM, Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu> wrote:
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 ;)
As Rasmus, and I, said numerous times, the PHP License is a perfectly
valid choice as long as the software are distributed under *.php.net.
I see this move as yet another attempt to force developers to abandon
a totally valid license in the name of the Debian ideal, Free
Softwares. I cannot blame anyone willing to reach this goal but as a
matter of fact, there is no issue with the PHP license, not anymore
since 3.01.
And about dealing with Debian about that, well, Debian has actually
more to lose than any other 3rd parties. Let focus on getting the web
stack rocks on Debian instead.
Cheers,