The PHP Group retires its quirky, and partly non‑GPL‑compatible licenses in favor of the widely used BSD 3‑Clause.
Here’s something that doesn’t happen very often. Almost exactly 23 years after it was approved by Open Source Initiative, the folks at PHP are retiring the PHP license and adopting the BSD 3-clause license instead. News of this first came on Friday in a blog written by Ben Ramsey, a release manager with PHP. It became more official on Monday, when he sent an email notification to the OSI license review mailing list:
On behalf of the PHP Group, I am submitting notice of the voluntary retirement of the PHP License 3.01.
I recently wrapped up a multi-year process, working with the PHP Group, Zend Technologies, and the PHP internals community to invoke clause 5 of the PHP License 3.01 to adopt the modified BSD license as the new version of the PHP License.
As of today, the PHP License 3.01 is no longer used by PHP, and the PHP project discourages use of the license for new works.
…
Since the process for voluntary retirement isn’t described on the OSI website, please let me know if there’s anything else you need from me to complete this process.
Cheers,
Ben
If you don’t know, PHP is a server‑side scripting language that’s primarily used for building dynamic websites. It’s what powers WordPress, meaning the page you’re reading right now was served to you with the help of PHP.
The story of PHP licensing over the years makes a good read as chronicled by Ramsey in his blog. Long story short, the PHP license started with the release of PHP 3 in 1998, created by PHP’s original author, Rasmus Lerdorf, who created it as a modified version of Apache 1.0. PHP 4 was released under two licenses, with PHPv3 covering most of the software, and the Zend Engine License covering software in PHP’s Zend/ directory.
“These weren’t bad licenses,” Ramsey wrote. “Most developers, distributors, and companies accepted their intent and moved on. But gaps between intent and substance have a way of accumulating. The Zend Engine, once imagined as a separable product, had been inextricably bound to PHP for 25 years; the notion that it required its own license had become a historical artifact. Condition 4 of the PHP License — restricting derived products from calling themselves ‘PHP’ — created real ambiguity for Linux distributions like Debian, which patch and redistribute PHP.
“Neither license was GPL-compatible, and the Zend Engine License had never been OSI-approved. Yet strip away the PHP Group-specific and Zend-specific conditions from both licenses, and what remains is effectively the modified BSD license, otherwise known as BSD-3-Clause.”
The decision to do away with one license that’s essentially a Xerox of another more universally used license, and to do away with a second license that only covered part of the code and has never been OSI-approved (and isn’t compatible with the GPL), probably put a smile on the lips of the OSI folks. Since its beginning, OSI has sought to discourage the creation of yet another open source license in favor of finding an existing license that’ll fit the bill.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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