Interview - PHP's Creator, Rasmus Lerdorf

The Open Source movement

SP: The Open Source movement is still portrayed by many as "anarchistic" and some kind of "threat to society". Do you feel it will ever gain mainstream acceptance? If it does, how will the Open Source community deal with that?

RL: I guess there are two parts to this question.

As far as being mainstream, the product of this "movement" is most definitely mainstream. The "movement" built the Internet as we know it today. It built the TCP/IP stacks used in most of the operating systems people use (yes, even Windows). It built the most popular Web server in the world, along with the DNS and MTA systems that make the Internet tick. Heck, if you go back a bit, it built the entire industry. The first operating systems were all open source, because that was the only sane way to do things. You could not sell someone a big mainframe without providing the source to the brains of the thing. It was only later on that the concept of not providing the source code was introduced.

But I guess your real question is what I think of Microsoft's attempt to convince the world that large groups of people collaborating to solve problems somehow threatens the very fabric of the society we live in. And I don't think there are "many" people making this claim, as it is complete crap -- I would like to think that the world is a good place and not full of people who would propagate such a ridiculous idea. Let's put an end to all meetings of large groups of people while we are at it. They might be evil anarchists out to destroy the world.

In the end, mainstream acceptance is not the goal. The goal for most people who work on free software and open source projects is the technology itself. It is building a tool that solves the problem. It is not about ideology for most of us, and as such, mainstream acceptance only involves mainstream use of the technology. This has been achieved on many fronts already, with many more still to come.

SP: PHP gets very little mention in the mainstream IT press. Do you feel that PHP is being deliberately ignored outside of Open Source circles?

RL: PHP is not very exciting and there isn't actually much to it. It is a thin glue layer between your Web server and all the various things you might want your web server to talk to.

In the old tradition of UNIX, we rely on small specialized add-on libraries to do all the heavy lifting with as little interference from PHP as possible. ASP, JSP and Cold Fusion all have large companies with large advertising budgets behind them and the products themselves get bigger and more complex with every release so that customers will feel they got their money's worth. Who is going to spend $10,000 for a floppy and a 2-page manual?

That floppy and the 2-page manual might actually be exactly what they need to solve their problem, and as such it might very well be worth spending $10,000 on a small targeted solution like that. Small targeted solutions are of little interest to large software companies. The concept doesn't scale. Small targeted solutions with no advertising budget are of little interest to the trade rags.

So no, I don't think it is deliberate that PHP gets very little press. PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?

SP: The move away from GNU public license from PHP v3.0 to v4.0 has caused a stir among the Open Source community. Do you feel the new licensing model has now been accepted and understood as the best direction for PHP to take?

RL: PHP 3 was dual licensed actually. So we didn't actually move from the GPL to something else, we simply dropped the GPL part.

I don't really see the point of dual-licensing, and it causes a lot of confusion. By putting PHP solely under the Apache-style license it is under today, a lot of this confusion was resolved.

Dual-licensing doesn't really work as far as I am concerned -- the less restrictive of the 2 licenses is what people are going to use anyway. The various protections that the GPL offers are quite pointless when people can simply choose to use the software under the less restrictive Apache-style license. So it made sense to just go with the less restrictive of the two licenses.

If you take a look around, there are no significant scripting languages that are GPLed. And by GPLed I mean strictly GPLed in the single license sense. Perl is dual-licensed with the completely unrestrictive artistic license. Python has its own license. Ruby is dual-licensed with its own license. Tcl is under a BSD-style license. I don't see why PHP not being under the GPL would upset anybody.

Like the other scripting languages probably realized somewhere along the line, the GPL is not really needed. I would have no problems with Microsoft abandoning ASP and moving completely to PHP. They might embrace and extend it, sure, but at that point we would be in a purely technical race with them. That's a fight we can win, and in the end, having PHP everywhere would be a cool thing for the PHP community.