[License-discuss] Making the PHP FAQ generic

Karl Fogel kfogel at red-bean.com
Fri Dec 7 19:07:23 UTC 2012


Ben Reser <ben at reser.org> writes:
>Attached is a patch that makes the PHP FAQ question generic.

Thank you for doing this, Ben.

A couple of suggestions:

Preserving the "php-code" element id is good, for compatibility, but we
should really create a new id as the canonical one to use from the table
of contents.  How about "language-vs-license" ?

Also, it might good to talk about implementations of languages being
open source, rather than the languages themselves.  It's a bit pedantic,
but I think it can be worded naturally, and it would emphasize the
conceptual cut one has to make to really understand the answer.  If you
compile your C program with Borland's C compiler, that doesn't make your
program closed-source; by the same token, if you run your Python program
on the most widely-used implementation of Python, which is open source,
that doesn't make your code open source by default.

People who ask that question may think they're asking about the
language, but they're really asking about the particular language
implementation.  This should be made clear to them in the answer.

-Karl



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