Posted by Andy Hassall on 07/23/07 12:44

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 11:40:02 +0200, Martin Larsen
<martin+spamfree+larsen@bigfoot.com> wrote:

>And now to my question: Is there a way to contact the PHP Group directly?

According to license.txt in the PHP distribution:

"The PHP Group can be contacted via Email at group@php.net."

I wonder if you might have more luck with Zend, the company behind the core of
PHP (the Zend engine). Since this includes the compiler + bytecode interpreter
anyway, they should be well-placed to answer.

http://www.zend.com/company/contact_us

Have you contacted the FSF as well? Since they produced the GPL license, they
may be able to clarify its terms.

>I have an idea that if we could get a "official" statement of the
>linking or non-linking involved, they might be more prone to listening.
>
>And again, I certainly don't want the PHP Group or any other to comment
>on the good or bad of plugins being GPL because that is entirely
>irrelevant. I just sincerely believe that their technical resoning is
>entirely wrong.

If it were "libraries" then I'd interpret it as "dynamic linking" in the
context of the GPL. This seems to be backed up with the already-quoted:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL
"Another similar and very common case is to provide libraries with the
interpreter which are themselves interpreted. For instance, Perl comes with
many Perl modules, and a Java implementation comes with many Java classes.
These libraries and the programs that call them are always dynamically linked
together.

A consequence is that if you choose to use GPL'd Perl modules or Java classes
in your program, you must release the program in a GPL-compatible way,
regardless of the license used in the Perl or Java interpreter that the
combined Perl or Java program will run on."


Introducing the term "plugin" seems to point to the following, though:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins
"If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to
each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program,
which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the
plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a
GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be
followed when those plug-ins are distributed."


There does seem to be a valid distinction between a library, which implements
a particular function and makes that available to /any/ other application that
loads it, versus a plug-in that explicitly extends one application - which
makes the argument of "derivative work" plausible.

It's not entirely clear, so it's an interesting question.

--
Andy Hassall :: andy@andyh.co.uk :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space :: disk and FTP usage analysis tool

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