My earlier post about Turck-mmcache is now deprecated. Turck-mmcache has not been actively developed in quite a while. eAccelerator is a fork of Turck-mmcache and has been actively developed by a new team.
eAccelerator fixes all the PHP crashing errors I had, and adds support for newer version PHP too (including PHP 5.1 in their latest dev snapshot, which I’ve had working perfectly btw)
It seems that the developer of Turck-mmcache was given a job at Zend (a company who have their own, closed source, php accelerator) and ended his development of the free one.
Additionally, the guy who owns the copyright (not the developer), a Mr. Turck, has refused to sign the copyright over to allow a license change (from GPL to a license that could be linked with the PHP code and distributed by, say, Debian). This is of course Mr. Turck’s right.
I generally support the use of the GPL myself, but in this case, the use of eAccelerator is severely restricted due to it’s license conflict with PHP. The makers of PHP are highly unlikely to add a license exception for a competing product, so the only alternative is to change the Turck-mmcache/eAccelerator license (LGPL should work). Unfortunately this can’t happen without Mr. Turck’s agreement as he owns the copyright.
In the meantime, there is nothing stopping us from downloading the eaccelerator source and compiling ourselves and using eAcclerator, we just can’t distribute the binaries.
I read that the eAccelerator guys are planning a rewrite from scratch using a more compatible license, so Debian will be able to distribute this one day.
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