On 12/18/06, Felix Geisendörfer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well I think most of your concerns are related to patent trolls. I doubt > the Cake foundation will be able to defend it's users from those, but I also > doubt that they'll sue small companies where no big money is to be made. An > excellent read on this topic is Paul Grahams: "Are Software Patents Evil?".
"Patent trolls", it's just the term I was thinking about but could not remember while I was writing the original message. So I thought it was worthwhile providing some examples like the Eolas and PanIP cases. I can think of some "innovations" at the heart of CakePHP that some "enterprising" folks might acquire patents for. However, I won't list them here :) so that they actually have to *work* to get those patents filed in the first place. You're probably right in that patent trolls will not go after small shops, however it *could* potentially happen to my employer. As I have said, he's been sued enough times over lesser things than patent violations. To give a little insight on this project with revealing too much, let's just say this is one of those things that will become disruptive to a niche business. As for protection from getting sued, that is not mentioned anywhere on the CSF website or in its official documents. So I guess it would be safe to assume that the CSF was not formed to protect its users. From further reading, I think that the CSF has the following goals/purposes (please correct me if I'm wrong): * Serves as a central entity to which copyright and ownership of the CakePHP code can be assigned to. This is to ensure that no one person owns the code base. * Serves to provide a certification body for CakePHP applications. Similar in spirit to JBoss Foundation. Or more closely to Sun Microsystems whose duties include certification of J2EE and Java implementations among other things. * Serves as a central point where donations are sent to. This is so that no one person is left holding a large wad of cash :) * Serves as a central point for organizing promotional campaigns for CakePHP. * Serves as a central point for organizing and forming standards to which CakePHP must adhere to. > I'll leave it to the project manager (gwoo) or PhpNut_ to answer your > foundation specific questions, but knowing the current team I can pretty > much promise you none of us would try to file patents on CakePHP technology > just to sue the CakePHP users later on. It would be a very sad day for the > entire open source movement if something like this would ever happen ... Even sadder still is that there are really no guarantees that will keep this sort of thing from happening. I think that depends on how legally binding the CSL or CSSL really is. I really hate it when code becomes entangled in legal mumbo-jumbo. I have been participating in other FOSS projects ever since I was in college and I have never had to worry about legal issues such as this. However, things have taken a turn for the worse recently. Just look at the articles on ChillingEffects.org. As an addendum to my previous email, I am very much interested in item 3 of the CSSL. It is interesting because it allows contributors who own patents that apply to a contribution to "grant to the Foundation and to recipients of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work". That part of the paragraph seems to be geared towards preventing another "SCO vs IBM" from happening. However the last part of the paragraph seems worrying: If a contributor is sued on the grounds of patent cross-licensing infringements any patent licenses assigned to CSF are terminated. What happens to the code contributed by the corporation? Does it get removed? What if said code is crucial to CakePHP's operation and cannot be removed easily? Sorry to bother with all these questions. Like everyone here, I would rather spend time writing code than worrying about legal issues. -- _nimrod_a_abing_ [?] http://abing.gotdns.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
