[License-review] Request for Legacy Approval of PHP License 3.01

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020 at 12:41 PM Pamela Chestek <pamela at chesteklegal.com> wrote:
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> On 3/5/2020 12:06 PM, VanL wrote:
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> Hi McCoy,
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> These are interesting questions.
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> On Thu, Mar 5, 2020 at 10:04 AM McCoy Smith <mccoy at lexpan.law> wrote:
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>> 1. Does this license, and it's predecessor PHP License 3.0, satisfy the OSD, specifically OSD 3? I'm thinking particularly about the following requirements:
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>>   "4. Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor may "PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission from group at php.net.  You may indicate that your software works in conjunction with PHP by saying "Foo for PHP" instead of calling it "PHP Foo" or "phpfoo""
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>> This seems to me a bit problematic given it's (AFAIK) not a registered trademark of the software authors. It appears to be restricting certain modifications of the software or the way that licensees may present modified versions of that software.
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> My first instinct is to point out that registration is not required to have an enforceable mark. PHP is pretty well-known in its space, and so I wouldn't be surprised if this provision were fully enforceable under common law trademark provisions, and, if needed, the PHP project could get a registration pretty quickly as the senior user.
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>>   "6. Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following acknowledgment: "This product includes PHP software, freely available from <http://www.php.net/software/>"."
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>> [BTW: I understand that similar sorts of provisions exist in other OSI-approved licenses; I'm raising the question of whether the general idea of mandatory modification restrictions or mandatory pseudo-trademark acknowledgement obligations are consistent with the OSD]
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> More broadly, I don't see a problem OSD #3-wise with limitations on trademark rights, assuming that they don't try to tramp on nominative use.
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> Agree wholeheartedly with Van. I read this as not allowing a trademark use but allowing a nominative use, which is how I read the Apache license too.

Does this mean that any author of a PHP extension using the PHP
license -- or indeed some software completely unrelated to PHP using
the PHP license -- can treat a trademark use of PHP as a breach of the
license, and is that appropriate, compared to the situation that I
think was contemplated by such licenses where the licensor is also
presumably the trademark owner?

Richard