PHPurple 0.1.0 pre-alpha is released

[John Bailey]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 12:32:48PM -0500, Greg Hudson wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-03-02 at 13:02 -0800, Sean Egan wrote:
> > Since Pidgin is GPL, you can't distribute phpurple under a BSD-style
> > license. You're pretty much limited to distributing it under the GPL.
> 
> There are an awful lot of people in the open source community operating
> under the theory that the BSD license (sans advertising clause) is
> "compatible" with the GPL.  The idea is that all of the restrictions of
> the BSD license are also restrictions of the GPL, so you can distribute
> BSD-licensed code under the terms of the GPL, so it's okay to combine
> code under the two licenses.  To the best of my knowledge, this theory
> has been blessed by the FSF.

It is within the terms of the licensing to take 3-clause BSD licensed
code for a GPL project, but the only way GPL code can be taken to any
other project is for that project to be or to become GPL-licensed.  ANY
derivative of a GPL work must be GPL, and the use of any GPL code
requires the resulting code body to be GPL.  This is not a difficult
concept.

> (That said, distributing libpurple PHP bindings under a BSD license
> wouldn't be functionally much different than distributing them under the
> GPL.  Any work using the bindings would also be using libpurple and
> would thus be bound by the terms of the GPL.)

See above.  Anything based on libpurple *must* be GPL if it is to be
distributed.

John
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