PHPurple 0.1.0 pre-alpha is released

[Daniel Atallah]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 3:41 PM, Anatoliy Belsky <anatoliy at belsky.info>
wrote:

> 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.
>

Yes, changing the libpurple license is going to be pretty much impossible as
there are a number of contributors who wouldn't agree to it even if there
was a movement to do so.  This is the reality of the situation.


> 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
> ...:


You seem to be confused about what the GPL would restrict in such a
situation.  Effectively the restriction is that if you distribute GPL'd
product, you must also distribute the code to anyone who you've supplied a
binary.  Within the constraints of the GPL you can do whatever you want from
a commercial perspective.


> 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 ..


I don't follow the exact meaning the last two paragraphs, but effectively
what you must keep in mind is that even if you don't like the restrictions
imposed by our licensing, you must abide by them..

-D
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