Hello Charles,
thanks for your heads-up. I've monitored the discussion on the pear-dev
mailing list very closely and already decided, that the upcoming 1.4.0
release of Services_Weather will contain a switch to the 3-clause BSD
License.
Best regards,
Alexander
Charles Fry wrote:
Hi,
As you may already be aware, a Debian package of your PEAR
Services_Weather module has been created for distribution as a part of
Debian (and thereafter all of its derivatives). Unfortunately, it was
discovered that the PHP License under which Services_Weather is released
is problematic for software other than PHP itself. This problem has
already been brought before the PEAR community, and is being actively
worked on. If you are interested, you can read about the problems with
the license (when applied to software other than PHP) and some of the
ensuing discussion at:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/08/msg00188.html
or in one of the PEAR mailing lists which were also involved in the
discussion.
To give you a sense of how uncompatible the PHP License is for the
release of software other than PHP, please consider point (6) of version
3.0:
"Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following
acknowledgment: 'This product includes PHP, freely available from
<http://www.php.net/>'."
While this is perfectly reasonable when distributing PHP itself, it
would be silly to think that you really expect us to only distribute
Services_Weather bundled with the entire PHP distribution. :-)
The PEAR team is currently working on how they would like to address
this issue:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/08/msg00238.html
But in the meantime, Debian is forced to remove PHP Licensed packages
(except of course for PHP itself) in order avoid violating the license.
We would, however, love to keep Services_Weather in Debian if you are
able to change the licence to something more compatible with your
package. The BSD License is quite similar to the PHP License. In fact,
the first two clauses of the PHP License were drawn from the BSD
License. You can find an example BSD License at:
http://www.debian.org/misc/bsd.license
Note that the third point is optional, and is often left out.
We hope that you'll be able to migrate Services_Weather to a license
that is not specific to PHP itself, in order to allow us to distribute
it in Debian.
Thanks for your understanding, and please feel free to contact us with
any further questions that you have regarding this matter.
Charles
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