PHPurple 0.1.0 pre-alpha is released

[Anatoliy Belsky]

Hi there,

yes of course, I like GPL. I'm all in all the one, who I am, because there is 
the opensource movement. I think, the programmers would be much more 
narrow-minded, it there were no opensource. 70% of my knowlege comes from the 
opensource. But ... it happened that a long time I've programmed PHP. Now I'm 
so far, that I can write C modules for PHP ... unfortunately, PHP has also a 
license ... ;) since version 4 it was changed from GPL to PHP license (which 
is more like BSD license). 

As I've started PHPurple, I had only the rough notion, what all that licenses 
are. As I've started, I've asked questions about it at the Pidgin and PHP 
mailing lists. That messages in this mailing list must be for sure in the 
archives. The answer from the Pidgin mailing list was - there are so many 
Pidgin developers, that there is no chance to get the permition for the PHP 
license.

The situation in the PHP world is so, that the projects for the most part 
aren't GPL'ed. Because of the "spirit" (Sascha Vogt ;)) of it's license, it 
may be easy reused and commercialized. I'm not a lawer, and i wan't to be it, 
but I've never get stucked on such things with any of PHP scripts. I wanna 
simply write good software. Does it make sense, if its use is then 
restricted?

The other (and not the least) part of my thougts is - i wanna to make good use 
of the PHPurple, even commercially. As I've had a minimal working example 
(after about 1,4 months I've started), I've already had an offer about the 
use in a commercial project. I've already 2 people who would use it in their 
noncommercial (but not GPL'ed) projects. It works, it will work (but I've no 
any GPL projects claims at all) ... libpurple developers are cool ... but 
think about it, which commercial project will become GPL'ed ever??? who would 
want this? they will simply do not use the binding .. but with the license 
below, they may use the binding ... hm, is this bad? there are such things, 
there are such projects ... yeah, it's not GPL, but such things do exist ...: 

So, as a summary - I'm very convinced, as a programmer, that some license like 
below would make the life of the binding much better and easier, which would 
be better for the libpurple itself. I see the freedom of the GPL in this case 
as a compulsion. I don't think, that simply blindly following the bible, 
someone gets to elysium. Yeah, opensource bible of course .. 

Regards,

Anatoliy


PS:

Just a last minute link: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#The_GPL_in_court

where we can see the ambiguous sense of the "derivative"

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On Monday 03 March 2008 20:06, Kevin Stange wrote:
> Anatoliy Belsky wrote:
> > yeah, now i know ... i must fall back to gpl ... hm ... ok ... this is
> > what i wanted to avoid ... because then the binding isn't so welcome, as
> > if it would be with that art of the bsd license
>
> I perceive that for some reason you /do/ think that there's something
> wrong with licensing your code under the GPL, but when I asked before
> you said without a doubt that you didn't have anything against the GPL.
>   In the context before I was asking about whether you had any reason
> that you felt the GPL was wrong for your project.
>
> So far you have not given such a reason, but you have by your statements
> made it seem like a hassle or a major problem to have to switch
> licenses.  Could you please explain to us why you feel that the BSD
> license is more appropriate for your project?  Perhaps we can clear up
> some GPL misconception that is making you feel it's not the right
> license here.
>
> Either way, you should still relicense, if for no other reason than to
> establish a clear line that any derivative works of both libpurple and
> your project combined (and logically anything derivative of your project
> would implicitly be of libpurple) must be released under the GPL.  That
> requires little more than replacing the license file in your code (and
> license headers in your source files) and maybe a tiny note on the web
> page for your project.
>
> Kevin