Re: [PDO] Unanswered questions (was Re: [PDO] Re: PDO 2: Request for Comments)

On 29.01.2008, at 08:01, David Fallside wrote:

I've been looking over the postings from the past few days, looking for concrete CLA questions that have not been answered. I've found a few that still seem to be outstanding (I am not claiming to have found them all), so here are some additional answers (IANAL, etc): ** "it still going to be a problem for many of us who work for larger organizations, that do have a patent portfolio (Yahoo, Amazon etc.)" Can someone explain what these large org problems are?

They might be worried that they are exposing/licensing their patents accidentally by contributing.

** "especially since there are items in there like #7 {DCF: in the CLA}, which put a perpetual burden on the contributor" I think Bill had an answer for this, but I had a different one, specifically: I think the 'perpetual burden' made explicit by the CLA is one that any responsible PHP developer already has. For example, if a developer found out that an already-committed piece of code had been wrongly copied from somewhere else, or that the code was covered by a patent, then would not that developer alert the rest of the community? I see no difference between the CLA and non-CLA cases.

Of course I would do this, but now I am legally bound to do so. Also it might become a question of interpretation if I realized that this infact is relevant to PHP or not. I might have just gained some information and someone else might now also say that I "should" have connected the dots and informed PHP about this. Before that it was something I would probably have done on my own free will and now its suddenly its something I have to do .. worse its a question of legal interpretation.

** "not being able to fix issues in PHP core extensions even if they happen to be breaking the build on one platform or another" The prior situation with some of the PDO v1 code was indeed a mess. I think the underlying issue there was too few folks working on the code that broke the builds. The proposed PDO setup would see significantly more developers working on that code on a day-to-day basis, and so if there were other build-related devs who did not want to sign a CLA, then there would be many more folks able and motivated to make the fixes.

There were dedicated developers working on these extensions back then already.

** "If PDO2 is CLAed, that means that the documentation is also CLAed right?" The primary concern of the CLA is the code, and it is not clear to me that documentation must be covered as well.

Yeah, the documentation is not said to the CLA'ed from all I have heard. So no worries there.

** "nothing is done to prevent the litigation against individual contributers in case their contribution *was* to be covered by a US software patent." Correct, CLAs do not (can not) provide that sort of protection. Furthermore, the existence of a CLA is no different from a situation in which there is no CLA in place: you could still be liable for patent infrigement. So the CLA doesn't change anything with regard this issue.

Right. regards, Lukas