BackPress: Core PHP libraries for your web applications

by nreece • 17 years ago

22 19 17 years ago

GPL licensed--not so useful for many purposes.

sanswork2• 17 years ago

Could you explain what these might be? Or what in a PHP web application with the GPL can you not do that you could with say a BSD license?

tolenka• 17 years ago

Distribute the code to anyone else under any terms other than the GPL.

cookiecaper• 17 years ago

The GPL is infectious; any code that uses a GPL library automatically becomes GPL as well. This is why the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License, which was developed for libraries) exists; the LGPL is just like the GPL except it doesn't infect linked code.

In short, using a GPL'd PHP library in your application mandates that significant swaths of your application be released under the GPL as well. That's not a problem if you wanted to release under the GPL to start with, but it's a problem for anyone else on either side of the spectrum; if you wanted to be All Rights Reserved, you couldn't, and if you wanted to be freer and license under LGPL, MIT or even public domain, you couldn't do that either.

For this reason, developers have to be quite careful about how they use GPL'd software to make sure that it doesn't impose unwanted licensing restrictions.

wayne• 17 years ago

Since it was an extraction from WordPress, which is GPL-licensed, maybe it was super hard to make this library LGPL since everyone who had contributed code had GPL-licensed it.

noodle• 17 years ago

i wonder what kind of crossover there is between this library set and code actively being used in wordpress if there is any. specifically, with respect to the seemingly frequent security issues and updates.

nir• 17 years ago

HN discussion seems to have taken a pretty negative attitude recently. WP are letting anyone use the code that powers their own apps. For free. In return we complain about the license (how many people write PHP code to be distributed without the source anyway? Wordpress itself is under GPL and seems to do quite nicely) or doubt the security.

mncaudill2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure that this is a WordPress/Automattic release. I couldn't find any indication of who actually is behind this, and the annoying hover ads are a weird touch.

AdamGibbins• 17 years ago

Automattic are behind it, at least it comes from their repo: http://svn.automattic.com/backpress/trunk

thechangelog• 17 years ago

They're not ads, just a much-maligned preview "feature" from snap.com.

pufuwozu• 17 years ago

After developing many WordPress based websites, I can say that the code and documentation aren't that great. I'm not sure why someone would want to extract something so unglamorous.

Hopefully the project will be able to improve both by giving it a different focus.

BackPress: Core PHP libraries for your web applications

Related Stories