Re: [PECL-DEV] Re: Re: [PHP-QA] Debian and the PHP license
Ángel González dixit:
> On 30/07/14 22:00, Stas Malyshev wrote:
>> You could not distribute other derived products bearing the name of PHP
>> - but distributing PHP itself is fine, since it's not a "product derived
>> from PHP" but the actual PHP. If Debian OTOH decides to make their own
The actual PHP is still normally patched in a distribution.
> + 4B= On the other hand, minor patches to products already containing
Absolutely no! That would make the situation much worse.
This is very vague language, which will not help but
add insecurities.
> There is some ambiguity on what is a B+minor patchB;, but I feel it's better
> to leave that to the courts should a lawsuit really arise (which would be a
The very idea of a distribution doing licence review is to
avoid things that could possibly, ever, go to court.
> or later. Use Common Sense for determining if it's a minor patch.
That does not work in a legal environment, unfortunately.
This is why the OSI (and many others) say to please leave
writing licences (code for the scripting language called
legalese) to experts (lawyers), just as we’d not want the
lawyers to write C code.
> Would this change have the blessing of Debian and the approval of PHP?
I highly doubt it. The current php5 source package in Debian
has 49 patches… on top of a 5.6 release candidate. Things like
porting to new platforms, etc. are not minor. One is named
“hack-phpdbg-to-explicitly-link-with-libedit.patch”. You could
say that every distribution makes a fork.
Looking at a BSD… there are 34 patches in MirPorts for PHP
as well, though the licence information there is set to say
that binaries may not be redistributed. Another option would
be to simply rename PHP to… Icescriptinglanguage? ;-)
bye,
//mirabilos (Debian Developer, but also MirBSD founder)
who’d personally prefer to just shut up and hack
instead of dealing with legal issues…
--
“ah that reminds me, thanks for the stellar entertainment that you and certain
other people provide on the Debian mailing lists │ sole reason I subscribed to
them (I'm not using Debian anywhere) is the entertainment factor │ Debian does
not strike me as a place for good humour, much less German admin-style humour”
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