Programming language PHP has solved long-standing – and sometimes very bitter – arguments about its licensing by ditching its two custom licences in favour of the Modified BSD License, or BSD-3-Clause.
The new licence is approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), and compatible with the "copyleft" GPL licence. It replaces the complicated prior dual-licensing that meant the latest version of the language was not compatible with OSI.
Ben Ramsey, a senior software engineer at Inuit who volunteered to oversee the change, announced the retirement of the server-side scripting language's PHP Licence 3 on Monday, after a six-year saga – with roots in the early days of open source philosophy.
