PHP development into dominance began in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf created a basic script for his website to help him keep it updated and provide him with statistics for visitor traffic and data usage. Originally he had named it his “Personal Home Page”.
In 1997, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski from Technion IIT developed Rasmus Lerdorf’s original script and parser into a new updated version of PHP known as PHP 3. It was these two Israeli developers who changed the meaning of PHP to “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”. PHP 3 was release publicly in 1998 and was soon followed by PHP 5 which fixed some of the script which, although not causing conflicts, was not efficient for database and website construction.
The PHP license is controlled by the PHP Group. To utilize PHP web hosting is not hard, but by gaining a PHP license doesn’t mean you can call your website a PHP product nor have PHP in its name. By accepting the license the most you can say is that your website works with PHP.