Hello Rasmus, the same applies to me as I pointed out to Richard already (as an example to Stephs argument). An NDA or CLA usually means that you can talk about stuff you do that contains patents and all that. Now we are not intersted in patents at all. And the solutiuon is easy keep your patent stuff at home or make it freely available. Then you can easily get permission fomr a lawyer to work on OSI complient stuff like PHP. If that was not the case then I wonder how people from IBM or other big companies could ever contribute to PHP. Since they did we obviously have no need at all for a CLA and anythign that comes along with it or as a consequence.
marcus Thursday, November 29, 2007, 10:03:56 PM, you wrote: > Richard Quadling wrote: >> The idea of a major world player contributing to our lill' old PHP >> sounds really exciting. The more the merrier, as long as the >> peer-review process works (and it seems to have kept me out of the >> core well enough!), let them come! > We welcome any and all contributions, of course, but where there are > strings attached it starts to get complicated. The problem here is that > IBM employees can't contribute to open source projects without some > protection in the form of a CLA. This CLA basically says that you have > the rights to the contributions you make and that if the company you > work for have copyrights or patents related to the contribution then you > grant all rights to the receiving project. On the surface it may not > sound too bad. It is sort of common sense that we aren't ripping off > proprietary code from somewhere and sticking it in PHP and that we don't > go out and get a patent on some concept and then put that code into PHP > in order to sue everyone using PHP for violating our patent. > However, the legal wording needed to do this looks something like this: > http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt > It is long and complicated and I don't see how anybody could sign this > without getting legal advice. You would also need to pass this by the > legal department of the company you work for. Legal where I work > wouldn't let us sign something like this for the longest time. They are > working through it now, so it may be possible, but they had a long list > of concerns and various needs for clarification as I am sure any company > would have when their employees start signing legal documents affecting > their patent portfolio. > The end result is that I think there will be a significant number of > current PHP contributors who either can't, or won't, sign a CLA like > this. And if the code covered by this CLA is a significant part of PHP, > then we have an untenable position. I would like to be proven wrong on > this. I have had no part in these discussions, but from what people > tell me the proposed CLA is based on the Apache CLA listed above, so > have a careful read through that and make up your own mind. > -Rasmus Best regards, Marcus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
