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