[License-discuss] Making the PHP FAQ generic

[Ben Reser]

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Karl Fogel <kfogel at red-bean.com> wrote:
> 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" ?

Done.

> 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.

I've tried to do this without using your example since I think as soon
as you start talking about a compiled language you start running into
other potential issues as the discussion here has shown.  I don't
really think these issues are legit, but I don't think the OSI can
answer that bit definitively.

> 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.

I've tried to achieve that.  We may need to noodle on it a bit more to
get something we all agree on.

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
> Note that these pages are generated by Drupal, not static HTML, so the
> patch isn't necessary (or rather, can't be applied). If you have a few
> minutes to incorporate Karl's suggestions, just send plain text of the
> next revision and one of us will put it into the HTML. Thanks!

I realized that, I figured a unified diff would be helpful in seeing what I did.

I've attached a new version of the patch.  Below is the HTML directly
for just the FAQ entry.  The index will of course need to be changed.

[[[
      <div id="language-vs-license" title="language-vs-license"><a
id="php-code" name="php-code"><dt><strong>Is <em><SOME
PROGRAM></em> Open Source simply because it's written in
<em><SOME OPEN SOURCE LICENSED LANGUAGE></em>?</strong></dt>

      <dd>No. While languages like <a
href="/licenses/php.php">PHP</a>, <a
href="/licenses/Artistic-Perl-1.0">Perl</a> or <a
href="/licenses/Python-2.0">Python</a> have implementations that are
licensed under Open Source licenses that doesn't turn all code written
in these languages or run under such implementations into Open Source.
The code written in such languages or run under such implementations
needs to be licensed under an approved Open Source license in order to
be Open Source.</dd></a></div>
]]]
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