Revisiting the PHP binding license issues

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 06:01:51PM +0200, Yannick Warnier wrote:
> My 2 cents: I think it would make sense for Olly (the project
> founder/leader/maintainer) to ask the Free Software Foundation
> directly, if that wasn't done before. They are the top experts on the
> subject and have legal advisors for that.

The FSF's take on this is already clearly stated on their website:

    "It is incompatible with the GNU GPL because it includes strong
    restrictions on the use of “PHP” in the name of derived products."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PHP-3.01

As I wrote in my earlier reply, we're working towards a solution to
this which will hopefully allow redistributing binary packages of
Xapian's PHP bindings for the next release series, provided you
configure xapian-core suitably.

If that answer isn't a fast enough solution for you, all I can really
suggest is persuading the PHP developers to drop the problematic clause
from their licence, or at least adding some sort of exception to it to
allow GPL compatibility.  That would fix the problem once and for all
for all GPL software.

Cheers,
    Olly