License Announcement

This document was issued on 02 April 2004 and was revised on 08 January 2006 when adding the MIT License. It lists the licenses that PEAR packages can be released under.

The PEAR Group would like to announce the following refinement of the current license FAQ entry.

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The current list allows a great number of licenses which vary greatly. This means that users may have to learn the in's and out's of a lot of licenses. Also some of the license choices impose comparatively high restrictions to the standard PHP license (GPL, QPL ..). As PEAR aims to extend the functionality provided by PHP users of PHP should fairly safely be able to also use any PEAR package without licensing worries, be it for commercial or non commercial, closed or opensource use.

Therefore with this announcement the license choices are reduced to the following short list:

• PHP License

• Apache License

• LGPL

• BSD style

• MIT License

Other licenses may be accepted on a case by case basis, but will have to fit the above criteria. This decision has been made to simplify the current situation, and as with all decisions is open to be refined in the future using the RFC proposal methodology.

All packages, which are already part of PEAR as of now, which use other licenses, do not need to follow this regulation.

In the meantime the FAQ entry linked above has also been updated to reflect the decisions from this document.