Official approval for the PHP License v3.0

Rasmus Lerdorf rasmus at lerdorf.com
Tue Jun 3 16:53:28 UTC 2003


Poke poke,  So far no responses other than one suggesting we use another 
license.  Using another license is not an option as this is the license 
the code has been released under for years and it is the already released 
code I need an OSI-approved license for.  I can't go back in time and 
release that code under a different license.

Our next major version is likely to have a different license, but that is 
a completely separate issue.

-Rasmus

On Sat, 31 May 2003, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

> 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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> 

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