[libvirt] Question about PHP licencing for libvirt-php (php-libvirt for Fedora)

Michal Novotny minovotn at redhat.com
Wed Mar 9 18:34:30 UTC 2011


On 03/09/2011 06:17 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 06:05:22PM +0100, Michal Novotny wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I don't know who's the right person to ask so I'm posting this into
>> the libvir-list. We're going to have the libvirt-php package in
>> Fedora (but renamed to php-libvirt only) but I don't know about the
>> licencing. The licence in the SPEC file (by Lyre) is set to "PHP"
>> however the licence file describes the GPL licence.
>>
>> My question is whether somebody does know whether it's OK to write a
>> PHP extension under GPL licence or whether we need the PHP licence
>> for this.
> The PHP license is *not* GPL compatible
>
>    https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PHP_License
>    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
>
> So, the libvirt-php module would have to be under either the PHP license,
> or something less restrictive.
>
> Regards,
> Daniel
Well, I've been reading PHP-LICENSE-3.01 file of php-pecl-ssh2 package 
and I found out following in the PHP license:

   4. Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor
      may "PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission
      from group at php.net.  You may indicate that your software works in
      conjunction with PHP by saying "Foo for PHP" instead of calling
      it "PHP Foo" or "phpfoo"

This way we won't be able to call it php-libvirt unless we write to 
group at php.net for permission. Should we use the PHP license, i.e. ask 
for the permission, or should we move to some other license? Any ideas 
what license would be good for this?

Thanks,
Michal

-- 
Michal Novotny<minovotn at redhat.com>, RHCE
Virtualization Team (xen userspace), Red Hat




More information about the libvir-list mailing list