Debian and the PHP license

by jpswade • 12 years ago

122 87 12 years ago

ecaron• 12 years ago

Another conversation along the similar vein of "Debian putting its foot down about a license" is Firefox (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...)

timonovici• 12 years ago

It's not that Debian lacks things to do, and they are being picky about the licenses: it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb, and then somebody like Debian has to untangle the mess they created.

dspillett2• 12 years ago

It isn't really that "someone like Debian has to" generally - Debian has to as a large part of their reason for existing is providing a stable, reliable, and predictable system: both in terms of content (code and other assets) and license to use said content. If they aren't picky about these things they are not staying true to their stated aims (and a number of their users would be unhappy).

eitland2• 12 years ago

it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb

Actually true. You will find competent developers who will change the license across their web app codebase from MIT to AGPL on a whim, saying AGPL is just the same as GPL.

I find legal stuff seriously interesting but also seriously scary.

JohnTHaller• 12 years ago

Mozilla doesn't permit 3rd parties to make unapproved changes to their software and continue using their trademarks. It's in their trademark policy. Debian has a similar policy with respect to their trademarks. So, Debian created funnily named alternatives based on the code. All that made sense. What didn't make sense was all the people whining about Mozilla's policies and unironically complaining about how it restricted the Debian devs.

dspillett2• 12 years ago

The odd thing with that is that the problem became apparent, people discussed it, Mozilla didn't want to (or couldn't for some, presumably legal, reason) change policy, neither did Debian, sometime suggested the name change thing, both parties agreed that this was compatible with their policies, and so it happened. There was no drama between Firefox and Debian: just a problem, a discussion, and a solution.

The way some people presented it as a pitched battle between the Firefox and Debian teams is silly. Both were protecting their standing in some way, both appreciated the other's position, and a solution was found that causes no problems for either of them (aside from a small amount of user training along the lines of "yeah, it is Firefox under a different name").

gcb4• 12 years ago

the part about Debian policy being the same is false. see msg 364 of the Debian bug.

im on mobile now ...

Alupis4• 12 years ago

I'm glad Debian is putting their foot down on this issue. There are way too many careless and sometimes downright bad licenses floating around.

I've seen, and argued against, people using the WTFPL before: http://www.wtfpl.net/about/

Some, even in projects that could be considered "serious" and reused in another project (I won't touch a WTFPL licenses project because to me, it's not a license and is way to legally ambiguous).

I've seen way to many developers think they can write up some text and call it a license and it's "good". Not the case.

Pick a real license that was written by lawyers and has well understood (and preferably previously challenged) legal ramifications.

yellowapple3• 12 years ago

I don't see how "You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO" is ambiguous, legally or otherwise.

That said, this would probably be better served with an explicit public-domain declaration or equivalent (like the CC0 license).

asuffield2• 12 years ago

That's the other way around - Mozilla decided to start enforcing their trademark license more aggressively and told Debian to stop using the 'Firefox' trademark.

rockdoe6• 12 years ago

That's skipping a few steps :) Debian patched out some artwork because it didn't follow their license requirements, and the patches to remove the artwork ended up violating the trademark license. The trademark owner then did what trademark owners are required to do.

As I stated above, the artwork is now free even by Debian guidelines, so the only thing holding back Debian there seems to be inertia.

rockdoe6• 12 years ago

Apparently it's currently no longer needed, but making sure and dealing with the legalities is a sufficient drag that it's easier to live with the renaming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935

VLM2• 12 years ago

TLDR is the license is specifically intentionally designed to only be applied to certain named products from exactly one named group of coders, but random internet people are applying it to random code written by random people.

A bad HN automobile analogy would be if Ford had a clickwrap license on all new cars that summarized to "This Focus model car is provided by Ford, Ford wrote this Focus model car UI, Ford distributes this specific Ford Focus model, and you can officially do the FOSS thing with it, including Ford will not provide any guarantees". (note I'm guessing this isn't the real license on the ford focus UI, LOL, just a made up example)

And then GM sells a car, lets say, the Buick LaCrosse, and for reasons of apparent insanity slaps the Ford license on their car.

Next people are all WTF because GM released something under a license claiming that Ford owns it, wrote it, distributes it, and Ford won't provide guarantees (implying, I guess, that GM will).

Can I legally resell a GM car that claims its owned by Ford? So who owns this "GM" car, and if the license slapped on it is literally nonsense, is it even legally licensed software? So you're trying to sell a LaCross under the Focus license, are you claiming this thing is actually a Focus or that GM is a division of Ford, or Ford won't provide warranty coverage so I guess its implied GM will. If the license claims this is owned by Ford, but I bought it from a GM dealer, who's permission do I need to ask to relicense if needed? If I intentionally violate the license, can GM sue me if in writing they claim Ford owns this software, not GM? Or if Ford wanted, just to be jerks, could they sue me for using this GM software, because after all the license says Ford owns it. If the software crashes and kills people is a license falsely claiming Ford owns it a legal liability for GM for defamation (Ford owns it, its their fault not ours)?

angersock• 12 years ago

Yours is a very interesting use of car analogy.

chris_wot2• 12 years ago

You can never have too many.

thefreeman2• 12 years ago

I don't think that is really accurate. I think it is closer to:

- Ford makes car, licenses under Ford license.

- 3rd parties make add on products for the Ford automobile, like an updated radio, and say that it is licensed under the same license as the original car.

icebraining8• 12 years ago

It's not just a Ford license, it's a Ford Focus license. It's specific to the car, that's why the addon maker shouldn't use it for its radio.

VLM2• 12 years ago

In retrospect you are probably correct, or at least make a valid point, and it might have made the problem itself even clearer if I hypothetically slapped a license specifically naming the "Ford Focus by Ford" on something non-automotive, like Kelloggs Corn Flakes or a random Xbox video game.

However, that would violate the sanctity of the "automobile analogy", so for better or worse I stay within the automobile mfgr community. A sacrifice of technical excellence for style.

mikeash• 12 years ago

That is simultaneously the worst and the clearest car analogy I've ever seen.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

Matthias Urlichs wins the thread:

"I'd be for this [removing offending PHP modules] in a heartbeat if it would make people switch to a saner programming language, but that's wishful thinking."

eitland2• 12 years ago

Hehe, anytime, just give us a language with the same features and the same ide support etc and I'll happily let you bring along your improved standard library, nicer syntax etc.

I don't think most developers would miss the craziness, I don't think the features are tied to the craziness of the language and I'm sure a lot of us would change as soon as it became production ready (if not earlier.)

(Hoping for Hack to be a step in the rigth direction.)

wdewind• 12 years ago

Please don't post this flame war stuff.

chris_wot2• 12 years ago

What is the contradictory part of the license? And... What's the point if a license that contradicts itself? How on earth do they expect to enforce their conditions?

It's things like this that make me think "what did we do to deserve PHP?"

TallGuyShort• 12 years ago

It's not that the license is self-contradictory, it's that the license text (as written here: http://php.net/license/3_01.txt) implies that the software is distributed only by the PHP Group, and is therefore not usable without modification by anyone outside the PHP Group. The solution is simple: modify the text of your project's license to have similar clauses to the PHP license, but not mention the PHP Group, OR re-license your software under the BSD license or another, similar license.

icebraining8• 12 years ago

The solution is simple: modify the text of your project's license to have similar clauses to the PHP license, but not mention the PHP Group

That's not so simple; as a work produced by someone, a legal document may be subject to copyright. So you might need a license to the license to modify and reuse it :)

http://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyrig...

lambda3• 12 years ago

The contradictory part is that it makes several explicit references to the PHP project itself, which make no sense if applied to a project which is not PHP. In fact, this license explicitly says "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE PHP DEVELOPMENT TEAM" which is patently false for any software besides PHP itself.

The problem is that lots of other projects need to apply some license, and just for simplicity say "I'll just apply the PHP license," even though it makes absolutely no sense for anything but the PHP project itself.

djpowell• 12 years ago

I see the same problem lots with code that claims to be MIT and BSD licensed, but either doesn't include the license, or includes the license template with the placeholders for the year and copyright holder unfilled.

It makes complying with the license impossible.

masklinn• 12 years ago

There's nothing contradictory to the license, the license is interpreted by debian's legal and FTP Masters as only allowing distribution by the "PHP Group", any package using that license which is not from "PHP group" is thus "non-distributable".

The reality is that the PHP license is a license which exists solely for PHP itself and makes no sense whatsoever for projects which are not PHP, leaving them essentially license-less and thus "all rights reserved".

davidw• 12 years ago

My own small contribution to a Debian Licensing Hassle:

http://lwn.net/1998/0611/ircii.html

I cold-called one of those guys and he was kind of amused by the whole thing. It was not much fun though.

bellerocky• 12 years ago

It is clear, he said, that PHP doesn't care about the misuse of its license and the misusers don't understand that they are making a mistake.

You could replace "license" with a lot of other words and it would still a possibly accurate statement. "mysql api" comes to mind, as well as "classes" and "URL query variables like $_GET"...

jonursenbach• 12 years ago

Oh, here we go again. This is unnecessary bashing.

rebolek• 12 years ago

So the PHP license is as good as PHP itself. What a surprise.

jpswade• 12 years ago

From time to time people raise concerns of using PEAR packages licensed under the PHP license in GPL'ed code. In a discussion about this topic, the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, issued the following statement:

It all comes down to semantics of what linking means. The PHP license is pretty much identical to the Apache license and you could indeed make a case for not allowing any GPL'ed software to be "linked to" from Apache either.

See http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1.

The PHP license was chosen to match the Apache license because Apache and PHP are tied so closely to each other.

This hair splitting over linking, derivation and aggregation has been going on since the beginning of time. My stance is that you can indeed ship PHP licensed PEAR components on the same cd or in the same tarball as GPL'ed code because I see it as an aggregate work. This changes if you take PEAR code, modify it and copy-paste it directly into your own work. Then it moves from aggregate to derived. But the intent of the PEAR components is to be used in aggregate form. The PHP license allows you to use it in derived form as well, of course, but then you should be choosing a license other than the GPL for the derived work.

The FSF has a FAQ on aggregation here: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggre...

That text is heavily biased towards compiled software and they talk about executables and memory spaces which don't really apply in this case. If you don't consider using a PEAR component as aggregation then it logically follows that you also cannot have Apache call your code so you will have to stipulate that nobody can use your code from Apache. I think this is an extreme interpretation that pretty much nobody out there shares.

In short, I don't see an issue here. Move along.

For PECL extensions that are linked into PHP, the license must be compatible with the PHP license. That means you can not GPL a PECL extension or you would be violating the GPL. Note also that if you write an extension that links against a GPL'ed library you will be violating the GPL. If you need to link against a GPL'ed library, get permission from the author of the library to use the library under a compatible license.

The license of any PEAR/PECL package can be found in the head of all source code files, inside the <license> tag of the package description file (package.xml) and also on the package homepage.

dethstar• 12 years ago

But this isn't about linking issues. This is about distribution issues.

mangecoeur• 12 years ago

Not directly relevant, but is it me is is lwn.net one of the ugliest sites ever. practically anything, including dropping all the formatting altogether, would make it look better. In that vein, I think I've identified a CS-specific visual syndrome that makes CS people always choose a bizarre shade of salmon pink for everything. See aforementioned lwn sidebar, and other exhibits http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html http://www.lyx.org/images/about/main_window.png (there are others i can't be bothered finding right now, apache foundation has a number of gems, and more that have thankfully been redesigned in the last few years)

Debian and the PHP license

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