Is there a risk of PHP ever becoming Proprietary?

[westonkenny]

I believe PHP is developed by the PHP group.

It is under the PHP License which I believe is an open source license.

My question is whether it is plausible if PHP could be bought by some corporation ( or if the PHP group could be bought by some corporation), and whether that could be mean the corporation could start charging for PHP.

 

On November 13, 2006, Sun released much of Java as free and open source software, (FOSS), under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

 

I'm asking because ever since Oracle bought of Sun, it would likely mean that future versions of Java and MySQL might be proprietary.

It's kind of a sad day for open source Java community when Oracle bought Sun.

 

Should I Avoid using Java because Oracle might starting charging for Java in the future?

 

I Hate Paying for software technology so I try to stick to open source.  However, open source technologies might Not be open source in the future.

 

???Is there less of risk of being charged for technologies in the future if I AVoid using open source technology created by a single corporation ( i.e Oracle ) or a single person ( i.e Jean-Philippe Lang who is officially listed as the sole Developer of Redmine project management software ) ????

 

Would there be more of chance of my bills being lower if I used open source technologies that are developed by consortium groups or software foundations  ( ie Ubuntu Software foundation, Mozilla foundation ) ?

[ignace]

PHP is developed/maintained/documented by individuals like you and me (some of them are even on this very forum) not by some corporation so the chance of PHP becoming proprietary is non existant. Java on the other hand is developed/maintained by a company with commercial interests.

 

???Is there less of risk of being charged for technologies in the future if I AVoid using open source technology created by a single corporation ( i.e Oracle ) or a single person ( i.e Jean-Philippe Lang who is officially listed as the sole Developer of Redmine project management software ) ????

 

When a single person is developing a piece of software you might wanna think twice before actually using it, since updates to the project will be very sparse and finding support for the product is very hard. So sometimes it's better to stick to an open-source company to get support for a product.

 

Would there be more of chance of my bills being lower if I used open source technologies that are developed by consortium groups or software foundations  ( ie Ubuntu Software foundation, Mozilla foundation ) ?

 

This should be obvious since open-source technology costs you $0, that said though always keep in mind that 1) you want bugs fixed so verify it's an active project and 2) at some point you may need support. Make sure you can find it, when you do.

[thehippy]

There has been a great deal of news lately about 'Can a Programming Language be Copyrighted?' because of the SAS case in the EU courts.  The result was that they cannot be as it would be akin to copyrighting an idea, which would stagnate innovation and create oppressive monopolies.

 

The Java programming language is not proprietary, the Java programming is a standard as with nearly all programming languages.  Sun was and has been the primary authority for the Java standard, every since the release of the Java source the Java community has taken more of a role in the standard.  Another thing to note, is that there are many implementations of the Java programming language, obviously Sun, now Oracle is the most widely used implementation, but Microsoft, IBM, GNU, Apache and many other lesser known alternative implementations exist.

 

The parts of Java that can be proprietary is what is contained in the implementation of the programming language, the compiler, jvm, libraries and so forth.