Hi,
What is the current progress on this?
While the questions are specific to the PHP license, the original topic which sparked the discussion was about the usage of the php license for software other than the php itself.
The PHP Group and every php core devs participating in the discussion seemed to hold the idea that any sofware distributed under *.
php.net are fine to be distributed under the PHP license.
For reference here is Rasmus stating that:
states the following for php:
"You have a PHP add-on package (any php script/"app"/thing, not PHP itself) and it's licensed only under the standard PHP license. That license, up to the 3.x which is actually out, is not really usable for anything else than PHP itself. I've mailed our -legal list about that and got only one response, which basically supported my view on this. Basically this license talks only about PHP, the PHP Group, and includes Zend Engine, so its not applicable to anything else. And even worse, older versions include the nice ad-clause. One good solution here is to suggest a license change to your upstream, as they clearly wanted a free one. LGPL or BSD seems to be what they want."
The current PHP license version(3.01) was introduced in 2005 explicitly for clarifying the situation for pear and pecl:
You can see that the change was to clarify what counts as php software:
From the PHP project's side they was in the belief that they resolved the issue with the distribution of pear and pecl extensions under the PHP license.
I couldn't go over every related email on debian-legal yet, but it seems that many/most people was satisfied with the change PHP license version 3.01 brought but there were at least one person (Francesco Poli) who still argued that the license is still not good enough, but his problems were generic and not related to distribution of extensions in specific:
he also stated that while he thinks that his points are true he seems to be a minority with that opinion:
"Filing a serious bug against package php[345] is unlikely to produce significant results, unless I can convince other debian-legal regulars that there actually is a problem. If I filed a bug report now, the php package maintainer would probably come to debian-legal to check whether my claims are backed by some consensus on the list and/or review previous discussions about the topic: he would probably close the bug. Consequently, I think that I must first gain consensus on the list and *only then* file a serious bug against php[345] and hope the issue can be fixed by upstream."
but regardless of all that discussion the regarding php REJECT-FAQ stayed the same since 2005:
even though all of that discussion and effort from both parties.
for some years that doesn't really caused any visible issues, but something happened in 2014, because debian package managers started to fill license change requests for the extensions as Paul Tagliamonte started to enforce the REJECT-FAQ via filling issues in the debian bugtracker which was further escalated by Ondřej when he cloned
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=752629 for every affected package after he got turned down by the FTP Masters:
"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."
After that the PHP project got notified from the incoming bugreports for the extensions and I've tried to find a resolution satisfying both parties, but without much success.
Maybe this time it will be different.