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 -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
