Phpfmt for sublime text 3 just changed business model and nuked the Git repo

6 points by nanch ↗ HN
I just wanted to let sublime text users that depend on the phpfmt plugin that the author changed business model and deleted the git repository about 30 minutes ago.

The repo WAS available at https://github.com/ccirello/sublime-phpfmt and was forked to https://github.com/nanch/sublime-phpfmt/ just before the author ccirello nuked his repository to prevent people from reverting to an older version of the plugin.

Directions on how to revert to an older version of the plugin are at https://github.com/nanch/sublime-phpfmt

18 comments

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I left this message as an issue:

---

I may be mistaken, but it seems like you switched this from a "free" business to a "paid" business without letting people know what's going on.

I understand that you want to get paid and I'd be happy to purchase a license from you for fmt.phar, but you don't have any public pricing available and you've surprised me with this "upgrade".

Could you let us know what you're planning, why you're planning it, and provide some insight into what your thinking is?

As of now I'm forking and reverting to a previous version. I hope you can provide some guidance because I'd like to support you and I enjoy using phpfmt.

Thank you.

---

He responded:

> Be sure to buy a license when you do it.

and locked and closed the issue.

reference: http://imgur.com/wpZ5Apv

What was the original license? I'm guessing if the license was permissive then whatever was available under such license can be forked and made available to the community at no further cost?

P.s. I do understand the author spent time developing this but if thing was made available under permissive license and community grown around it then it is extremely not professional and not fair to change terms in such way.

From php.phar:

# Copyright (c) 2015, phpfmt and its authors

# All rights reserved.

# Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

# 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

# 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

# 3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

I'm not a lawyer but it looks like permission is required only if you wanted to "endorse or promote products derived from this software"

Apart from that you should be fine as long as you include this short license text in next releases.

That looks like a BSD 3-clause licence to me, https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause. The talk of DMCA takedowns is concerning and could mean that the original author is not aware that he can't revert the licence. I hope he just talks about accidental copies of a newer version. But even then…
Carlos got back to me via email and transferred ownership to me. I guess he didn't want to work on it anymore.

"I, hereby, transfer to you the copyright of the sublime-phpfmt and its derivatives.

Therefore, sublime-phpfmt and its derivatives copyright are yours, Nanch."

I'll see what needs to happen to be sure the sublime text plugin stays in working order so that people can continue using it.

What a strange day.

You misquoted what I wrote, Nanch.

I mentioned the engine also. fmt.phar is not part of this transfer. So you still have problems, only not with me.

I wrote:

---- Hey Nanch,

The engine itself is no longer my copyright.

The plugin though is mine. I, hereby, transfer to you the copyright of the sublime-phpfmt and its derivatives.

Therefore, sublime-phpfmt and its derivatives copyright are yours, David Nanch.

Regards, Carlos

Thank you for the clarification, I'll do my best to stay free from any licensing issues.
In my package CodeFormatter I've use php fmt. What I must to do now? I can left fmt.phar as is in my package? Without violation any licenses?
Hey Avtandil, I'm updating the sublime-phpfmt repository on packagecontrol.io so that users have a migration path.

The license for the fmt.phar has been referenced in the comments. My understanding is that the 3-clause BSD license referenced is permissible and non-revocable. You may want to freeze any updates to any phpfmt code you package/push.

I'm not sure how CodeFormatter delivers the phpfmt package so I can't provide additional guidance.