On 21.12.2007, at 10:08, David Zülke wrote:
I wonder why they need such elaborate bla bla to just say so
trivial things. The copyright part seems irrelevant given your
assessment and the patent clause seems overly complex if all they
are saying that any patents that are infringed upon by the
contribution that are owned by the contributor must be licensed
royalty free for all users of said code. The level of protection
for end users seems laughable to me, since there are still so many
holes open for evil doers aka patent trolls can exploit. So I
guess CLA are only a major annoyance and placebo.
The reason why they are so complicated is because they were written
by lawyers. If they made contracts in such a way that mere mortals
understand them, the wouldn't be able to afford fast cars and big
houses.
Sounds to me like we should stop accepting this legal BS. Then they
will only be able to pay for a nice little house if they write
understandable stuff or nothing is they are unwilling to adapt to the
demands of their customers.
The copyright part is not irrelevant. It is different from country
to country. The copyright itself is transferrable in, for example,
the Netherlands and the United States, but not in Germany, Austria
or Switzerland. Most CLAs out there used by open source projects
are derived from the Apache Foundation CLA, which originates from
the U.S.
The legal text does not seem to take any effort to bridge these
differences, instead focusing solely on US law.
And CLAs actually _do_ provide reasonable protection. The idea is
that someone cannot sneak in code he has patents on, and later ask
for royalty fees. Same goes for people who contribute in goodwill,
but once the project is popular and successful, want a slice of the
pie for themselves. Or companies that allow their devs to
contribute to an open source project, then a new manager decides
that the company holds patents on the contributions and now wants
money for it. It protects everybody, and harms nobody (unless you
have something against granting rights to the project you're
contributing to).
Again, I have no issue signing over copyright, even though this does
not apply to my country of origin. I also do not have a problem with
signing over licenses for patents I or my employer may hold that my
be infringed upon by my contributions. But in order for me to sign
something, it needs to be understandable. More importantly for the
bulk of the project to be able to sign stuff like this is needs to be
really easy for legal departments to ok the terms. The Apache CLA
imho does not fit this criteria, though I do appreciate that there is
some level of standardization around the Apache CLA.
Anyways, I guess we have discussed the topic sufficiently given that
we do not have a final version for the PDO2 CLA or a proper lawyer to
give advice.
regards,
Lukas
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