[xdebug-general] Re: Is the xdebug's non-free license necessary?

I've held off jumping in here earlier, but just felt the need to throw
in my 2 cents, mostly because most of this 'free' argument has
rubbed me the wrong way for too long.

At the end of the day, everyone here is 'free' to not use xdebug at
all. The fact that you can do anything you want
*except* for use the name xdebug in certain ways without having some
permission from Derick first is pretty damn
amazing, but even THAT is not enough for some people.

PLEASE accept what's being given freely in that spirit. If you want to
make changes to something, just ask. Derick
is probably one of the more accomodating people in the PHP community.

While I'm all for 'open source' stuff, this points to a much larger
problem with OS licensing, and there's
nothing Derick can do about it. There is no caselaw specifically about
all these open source license interpretations,
and I doubt there will be for years to come. Even then, there are the
international implications to consider. It's
been a constant source of amusement to me that so many people jump on
the GPL bandwagon, especially for
PHP scripts, because the GPL was primarily written with C code in mind,
and there are references to 'linking' in that license, which
has a fairly defined meaning in the compiled-language world, but no
equivalent in the scripting world. There's much more
to be said about this whole issue, but I'll stop now.

In short, if you don't like it, don't use it. If you like it, and want
permission to do something else which you're not sure about, just ask.

Michael Kimsal
Received on Tue Dec 21 2004 - 14:52:36 GMT