I'm seriously torn about this. On one hand, of course, Debian is kind of right in their assessment and strictly speaking, the JSON extension and with that the PHP package is not entirely free software.<p>On the other hand, the risk of anything bad coming out of shipping code with this license (evil people will have no qualms violating the license :-) ) is very close to zero. However, the risk of people being seriously pissed off at the next version of Debian (or Ubuntu) breaking all their web applications is really high.<p>Yes, an alternate extension is starting to exist, but it might either work subtly differently from the built-in one (you know, bugs exist and people might depend upon them), or worse, might have security flaws remaining undiscovered due to fewer eyes reviewing the much smaller in scope extension.<p>This is not just bad for users, but also for developers of libraries who now have to take extra care to support the other extension.<p>It's ridiculous to having to go through all this trouble for some evil people to be able to use Debian :-)<p>Thank god I moved to packaging and deploying our own PHP for our application. Having to deal with a non-standard JSON extension for no reason but politics and lack of pragmatism would piss me off endlessly.<p>That all said and after having vented my frustration: I still see where Debian is coming from and I can also kind of understand their decision. Of course it still pisses me off, but I can understand it.<p>Maybe Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) just isn't the right distro for me. Though seeing that the replacement extension is made by a Fedora developer, I seem to be running out of options :-)