implications of gpl licencse in php

i'm going to undertake a new music catalog project which will heavily modify the stock php-nuke engine. since its gpl'd, i'm worried that i'm going to be required to publish all of my mods and some stupid "competitor" will just copy the site verbatim.

i'm sure i can just get around it by coding all mods in new php files, and letting it interface w/ the existing php-nuke files. but how about the database? is the whole nuke db gpl'd, and therefore subject to disclosure?

this feels to be an "ask slashdot" question, but i'm sure at least the admins of the bbs have encoutered it before. thanks.

I'd say that emailing the PHP-Nuke authors is the best way to find out. Chances are, though, that they're gonna tell you what you don't want to hear.

i just checked and freedb.org uses php-nuke. i'm going to go ahead and email them first, because what i'm going to undertake is very similar. i'm sure that they didn't have to open-source all their mods.

You should be ok as long as you don't distribute the software.

The only real purpose of the gpl is if you distribute the program, you must make source code available. You can't take the php framework you want to use, add your code, then sell it encoded with zend encoder for example. You must provide the source. If the framework was LGPL, you could 'plug' your code in, and encrypt/encode that, and you'd be fine, as long as the source or any modifications to the LGPL part were made public. That is how GTK+ works.

So, as long as you don't distribute your code, you're fine.

Yeah, according to the letter of the GPL (and IANAL), by using the framework on a website, you're not actually distributing it -- so you don't need to release the code. You're only distributing the generated output.

This is one of the "loopholes" that RMS was talking about closing recently -- you can use GPL'ed components to provide web services in a proprietary system, because you're not actually distributing them. I'm not sure how he's planning to do it, though.

This is one of the "loopholes" that RMS was talking about closing recently

And of course that won't apply retrospectively to people like you who have already received PHP under GPLv2. It'd only be a problem if RMS changed the conditions in GPLv3, and PHP released a new version under GPLv3 only (not likely as it'd be a bureaucratic nightmare if many people had contributed to PHP), and you wanted to upgrade to that version.

Peter

In reply to:

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[If] PHP released a new version under GPLv3 only (not likely as it'd be a bureaucratic nightmare if many people had contributed to PHP)...

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I doubt it'd be a "bureaucratic nightmare" if the contributors donated their code with the standard boilerplate text that allows licensees to choose GNU GPL v2 or any later version, at their choice.

I doubt it'd be a "bureaucratic nightmare" if the contributors donated their code with the standard boilerplate text that allows licensees to choose GNU GPL v2 or any later version, at their choice.

Good point. I knew about that clause but hadn't considered how it would apply to the PHP developers' own licenses to use each others' code.

Peter