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Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 01:03:59 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal for license change
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Wed, 2014-04-02 at 05:27 +0700, musicdenotation@gmail.com wrote:
> > Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor may
> "PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission from
> group@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"
> I propose removing this clause from the PHP license for GPL
> compatibility. My proposal is to make PHP a trademark (as Python is),
> because trademark law is intended to deal exactly with this issue. I'm
> completely happy with the current license, but I propose this as an
> improvement.

It is not that trivial. A few quick thoughts:

      * Getting a trademark for three letters isn't trivial, most
        trademark authorities limit those to few cases like BMW or SAP.
        We could probably prove PHP's relevance but still effort
      * Unlike Python we have no legal entity which could own it. We
        could only register it to a natural person (i.e. Rasmus)
      * We have no fundings to finance the registration (registration
        fees, lawyer to do the bureaucracy etc)
      * The thing with GPL compatibility is partly a religious thing --
        Mind GPL's virality: If one component is GPL all other parts
        become GPL, too. So if we'd lateron start bundling GPL code we
        are on a sword's edge of becoming GPL. This becomes really
        complicated with extensions for commercial libraries. Some
        contributors also have stronger objections to GPL.
      * We make use of other components which probably aren't
        GPL-compatible licensed either, see i.e. php-src/main/spprintf.c
      * Such a drastic change might require collecting permission from
        all past contributors. Some of them are hard to reach.

johannes