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Chapter 1 ✦ Why PHP and MySQL?
Open source software: don’t fear the cheaper
But as the bard so pithily observed, we are living in a material world— where we’ve internal-
ized maxims such as, “You get what you pay for,” “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” and
“Things that sound too good to be true usually are.” You (or your boss) may, therefore, have
some lingering doubts about the quality and viability of no-cost software. It probably doesn’t
help that until recently software that didn’t cost money — formerly called freeware, shareware,
or free software — was generally thought to fall into one of three categories:
✦ Programs filling small, uncommercial niches
✦ Programs performing grungy, low-level jobs
✦ Programs for people with bizarre socio-political issues
It’s time to update some stereotypes once and for all. We are clearly in the middle of a sea
change in the business of software. Much (if not most) major consumer software is dis-
tributed without cost today; e-mail clients, Web browsers, games, and even full-service office
suites are all being given away as fast as their makers can whip up Web versions or set up
FTP servers. Consumer software is increasingly seen as a loss-leader, the flower that attracts
the pollinating honeybee — in other words, a way to sell more server hardware, operating
systems, connectivity, advertising, optional widgets, or stock shares. The full retail price of a
piece of software, therefore, is no longer a reliable gauge of its quality or the eccentricity-level
of its user.
On the server side, open source products have come on even stronger. Not only do they
compete with the best commercial stuff; in many cases there’s a feeling that they far exceed
the competition. Don’t take our word for it! Ask IBM, any hardware manufacturer, NASA,
Amazon.com, Rockpointe Broadcasting, Ernie Ball Corporation, the Queen of England, or
the Mexican school system. If your boss still needs to be convinced, further ammunition is
available at
www.opensource.org and www.fsf.org.
The PHP license
The freeness of open source and Free software is guaranteed by a gaggle of licensing schemes,
most famously the GPL (Gnu General Public License) or copyleft. PHP used to be released
under both the GPL and its own license, with each user free to choose between them. This has
recently changed. The program as a whole is now released under its own extremely laissez-
faire PHP license on the model of the BSD license, whereas Zend as a standalone product is
released under the Q Public License (this clause applies only if you unbundle Zend from PHP
and try to sell it).
You can read the fine print about the relevant licenses at these Web sites:
✦
www.php.net/license/
✦ www.mysql.com/doc/en/GPL_license.html
✦ www.troll.no/qpl/annotated.html
Most people get PHP or MySQL via download, but you may have paid for it as part of a Linux
distribution, a technical book, or some other product. In that case, you may now be silently
disputing our assertion that PHP costs nothing. Here’s the twist: Although you can’t require a
fee for most open source software, you can charge for delivering that software in a more con-
venient format — such as by putting it on a disk and shipping the disk to the customer. You
can also charge anything the market will bear for being willing to perform certain services or
accept certain risks that the development team may not wish to undertake. For instance, you
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