implied assignment of license [LWN.net]

implied assignment of license

Posted Mar 24, 2026 21:01 UTC (Tue) by sagi (subscriber, #64671)
Parent article: A PHP license change is imminent

I appreciate this article. I was particularly interested in the "implied assignment of license" bit, followed the link and found [1] to elaborate on the point. It seems quite sensible, I had not previously seen this written down and it seems useful for other projects too.

[1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_license_update#copyright_and...

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implied assignment of license

Posted Mar 24, 2026 21:50 UTC (Tue) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I too was skeptical from the brief mention in the article, but it's pretty clear when you look at the actual licenses, and I wouldn't even call it "implied": the licenses explicitly allow "the PHP Group" and Zend, respectively, to issue new versions, and they allow recipients to use code under that updated version instead, and so if these two bodies decide that BSD-3-Clause is the next version of each license, which they have done formally, that's all it takes. It is also true that the first two clauses in the two old licenses and the new one are identical, and the other clauses are about endorsement/advertising by the PHP Group and Zend specifically and not by any individual contributor, so in practice nobody's rights are in any way affected by this move and nobody should feel bad about this change. But even if they were, the move is sound, just like it would be sound (but extraordinarily weird) if the FSF were to declare that the GPL 4.0 is BSD-3-Clause.

The point in that section you link is commonly called "inbound=outbound," see this post by Richard Fontana and this post by Bradley Kuhn that discuss it in more detail. The part that's implied here is that if you maintain code under a FOSS license, and I send you a patch, you can use the patch / the patched version of the code as if it had that same license, even if the patch context doesn't include the part of the file with the license statement, or even if you're not including the license in every file and just in a top-level COPYING or whatever. But this implied license is what gives the PHP project the authority to distribute contributions currently, under the current license. Provided they have that authority, it seems pretty explicit to me that the relicensing is sound.

implied assignment of license

Posted Mar 25, 2026 9:34 UTC (Wed) by paravoid (subscriber, #32869) [Link]

Indeed, the PHP License's upgrade clause makes this much more sound in my opinion as well.

To your point, there is perhaps a precedence here that actually involved the FSF and a third-party license! This happened in the relicensing of Wikipedia the GFDL to CC-BY-SA. This happened in 2009, by virtue of Wikipedia being licensed at the time as GFDL 1.2 "or any later version'. The FSF graciously released a new version of GFDL (at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation), v1.3, that had a carve-out that allowed relicensing to the CC-BY-SA. So the path there was GFDL 1.2 -> GFDL 1.3 -> CC-BY-SA 3.0 -> (eventually) CC-BY-SA 4.0. Each license allowed relicensing to the next one.

In the same sense, I think the PHP Group could have released PHP License 3.02, that added a new Relicensing clause that allowed relicensing to the BSD-3-clause. It seems like they skipped this step, but I suppose that does not make any meaningful difference.

IANAL, but Pam Chestek is and an excellent one, so I'm sure whatever they're doing is legally sound :)