Official approval for the PHP License v3.0

[Rasmus Lerdorf]

Could I get official OSI approval of the PHP license?  Being an Apache
license clone I sort of always just implied that the license was
OSI-approved, but for a couple of legal reasons I would like to make it
official and get the license listed at opensource.org.

The text of the PHP license can be found here:

  http://www.php.net/license/3_0.txt

It is almost a word-for-word clone of the Apache Software License v1.1
which is already OSI-approved.

Clauses 1 and 2 are identical.  Clauses 3 and 4 in the PHP License are the
same as Apache clauses 4 and 5 slightly reworded to talk about PHP instead
of Apache.  The real differences are:

Apache license clause 3:

  3. The end-user documentation included with the redistribution, if any,
     must include the following acknowledgment:

       "This product includes software developed by the Apache Software
        Foundation (http://www.apache.org/)."

     Alternately, this acknowledgment may appear in the software itself, if and
     wherever such third-party acknowledgments normally appear.

In the PHP license has become clause 6 and simplified to:

  6. Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following
     acknowledgment:
     "This product includes PHP, freely available from
     <http://www.php.net/>".

And the extra clause (#5) in the PHP license:

  5. The PHP Group may publish revised and/or new versions of the
     license from time to time. Each version will be given a
     distinguishing version number.
     Once covered code has been published under a particular version
     of the license, you may always continue to use it under the terms
     of that version. You may also choose to use such covered code
     under the terms of any subsequent version of the license
     published by the PHP Group. No one other than the PHP Group has
     the right to modify the terms applicable to covered code created
     under this License.

This clause is sort of stating the obvious, but we wanted to make the
point absolutely clear.

Hopefully the new Apache license whenever that gets finalized will be
OSI-approved and has the big advantage of being project-agnostic, so
projects such as PHP that are closely tied to Apache can use it verbatim
without having to massage it and we won't need all these individual
Apache-like licenses.

-Rasmus
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