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

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?

** "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.

** "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.

** "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.

** "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.

David