Zend Framework CLA

Calendar

Quicksearch

Get Jimdo!

Get a free website with professional content management features at Jimdo.com!

Wednesday, June 28. 2006

Contributors to the Zend Framework must first sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before they're allowed to commit anything. This is claimed to make the Zend Framework "IP clean", so big corporations have no problem adopting it. I've never believed in this proclaimed need of being "IP clean". Maybe that's because stealing someone's proprietary code never came to mind - am I just to good a person?

However, in a world where in certain strange countries (I won't drop any names here

) you can actually patent software - or worse, ideas - it is increasingly difficult to write a single line of code that you can be sure of not violating anyone else's so-called intellectual property. In the FAQ for the CLA there's one phrase that I do not get in this context:

By having a CLA in place, we mitigate the risk of companies like SCO claiming intellectual property infringement and coming after users of the Zend Framework, whether individuals or companies, for licensing fees.

How is this possible? Granted, a few lines above it says "to the best of the contributor's knowledge", but still, how can Zend make this claim? How is it possible to know for any individual contributor that his code doesn't infringe software patents of some patent troll, like SCO, without spending insane amounts of time/money? This is easily answered: It is not possible. Thus, I don't think the CLA has any legal meaning whatsoever. It's just a marketing instrument to help sell the Zend Framework to corporations. It would be fairly interesting to know, though, if Zend, if they must insist on signing a CLA like that, is planning on offering any kind of protection against silly patent lawsuits in case a troll comes along. What? Is there any point I'm getting to, you ask? Nope. Just ranting and wasting your time

Posted by Markus in PHP, Programming at 10:49 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (2)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Markus Wolff's Blog: Zend Framework CLA

Weblog: PHPDeveloper.org
Tracked: Jun 28, 14:56

Zend Framework CLA - Good or Bad?
A short rant my Markus Wolff about the ZF CLA and a lot lof high potential comments (by Andi Gutmans for example). This is worth a read even if you only thought about using the Zend Framework. ...

Weblog: Sascha Goebels WebLog
Tracked: Jun 28, 22:06

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

No your not ranting and wasting our time. That's a searious problem Why should I agree any CLA, just because I contribute code to a open source software? That's stupid, I don't get paid for it. And what's much more important, I live in switzerland, why the hell should I care about a the USA law of stupidity? As a swiss software engeneer, they can not sue me because I infringed a software patent, because there are no software patents in the swiss law, there is no such thing. But there is something called a contract, and if I agree to a contract, I can be sued if I break it. Somebody should check this. Imagine a european software developer, who don't have to think about any stupid US software patent, could be sued, because he signed this contract. I hope no one outside the US is that stupid to sign this.

#1 JD (Homepage) on 2006-06-28 14:21 (Reply)

"As a swiss software engeneer, they can not sue me because I infringed a software patent, because there are no software patents in the swiss law, there is no such thing." That is incorrect in many cases as countries signed trade agreements with the US and most often there are provisions there that allow a US company to sue non-US citizens this way.

#1.1 Derick Rethans (Homepage) on 2006-06-28 14:23 (Reply)

Yup , You're definitely just ranting and wasting my time. The fact is that other Open Source projects work the same way in order to protect their users. Contributor to Apache are also required to sign such CLA , as far as I can remember. And if that means that American firms can be less worried while using it, it's worth it. The more people use Open Source the better it get and everybody profits.

#2 Shlomil (Homepage) on 2006-06-28 14:37 (Reply)

Hm, I was unaware of other projects who used something like this - although it sure makes sense for them on some level. But you also have to see the other side of the coin: While it may provide a false feeling of security for some corporations, I can't help but feel that it causes some uneasyness amongst developers who're not sure if signing such a CLA may have any legal side-effects that might hurt them in the future. Maybe the ZF is missing out on some developer talent due to this - and without developers, open source is worthless. So while adoption is good, keeping developers at a distance is bad. I really think that the ins and outs of the CLA need to be discussed a bit more, and it would be good to hear of someone with experience in this field (e.g. a lawyer) if there may be any implications for the contributor that he would not face in other projects that don't have such a requirement.

#2.1 Markus on 2006-06-28 14:53 (Reply)

You have to understand the legal system, If you go bungie jumping you have to sign a waiver that you understand you might get hurt or killed. That waiver protects the company from your bad actions, it does not however protect the company from there own bad actions. In truth a CLA in no way prevents copied code, just like a waiver doesn't stop a person from doing something stupid. A CLA says Zend made all due effort to ensure the code is clean. It also says that a Company made all due effort to ensure they are using clean code. If a lawsuit where to ever happen the person that would end up at the end of the stick would be the person who commited the code not the company using the code and not Zend. Thats what a CLA is all about, the person commiting the code becomes clearly responsible for there actions.

#2.1.1 Richard Thomas (Homepage) on 2006-06-28 15:06 (Reply)

Hi Markus, Copyright is even more important than patents. I won't argue with you about enforcability of the latter, but as Derick pointed out, I wouldn't be too sure that trade treaties don't cover this to some extent or another. With the CLA you are actually not only declaring that you are able to contribute the copyright, but you are also assigning Zend rights. This is extremely important as we ship the framework and have people build their livings on the Zend Framework. I'm pretty sure that Switzerland also has a notion of copyright as do most countries in the world. In most courts of law there is a notion of best efforts. So by signing the CLA it also makes you very aware of the copyright/patent issues, meaning we mitigate the risk of you commiting something which isn't yours which in turn is the best effort we can do. This is the same as other projects have done including ASF (who's CLA we almost copied 1:1), Eclipse and MySQL (yes even the latter although it's well hidden). It's not foreign and there are plenty of situations where you should actually care as the end-user, especially if you're developing a commercial app on a framework which you are planning to sell, say SugarCRM for example. Anyway, one last point, you'd be surprised that there are also lots of companies in Europe that care about this. If not about patents then copyright which is much easier to enforce. Anyway, I hope that clarifies things a bit. I could obviously go on and on but I hope that answers your questions. If not you can feel free to get in touch with me. Don't forget that even if you decide the CLA isn't for you, you can still use the Zend Framework, and even make changes which you don't contribute back, thanks to the friendly New BSD license it is under.

#3 Andi Gutmans (Homepage) on 2006-06-28 15:07 (Reply)

Hi Andi, thanks for clarifying - this certainly sheds a better light on the subject. The only thing I'd still like to see is translated versions of the CLA - I can of course only speak for myself, but while my English is sufficient for conversation or even technical writing, I sometimes have a hard time translating all that legalese into terms understandable for mortal human beings. On the other hand, I have the same problem with some especially cryptic German legal texts

#3.1 Markus on 2006-06-28 15:43 (Reply)

By the way, as to the point of missing out on talent. We have received a huge amount of CLAs since launching the project. So it seems like the majority of people who are looking to contribute do understand the purpose of the CLA. There are also many who I have talked to, for who it is especially interesting as it makes it easier for them to use the Zend Framework in their commercial apps. Anyway, just a reference point. Just wanted to let you know though that the PHP community in general does seem to understand the idea of CLA. I think a lot because they are somewhat familiar with how Apache works. The introduction of the CLA a few years back has allowed a lot of commercial companies to bundle Apache software (some of the big ones include BEA, IBM, Oracle, and there are a huge number of small companies making a living off this).

#4 Andi Gutmans on 2006-06-28 15:13 (Reply)

Quote: "That is incorrect in many cases as countries signed trade agreements with the US and most often there are provisions there that allow a US company to sue non-US citizens this way." Would just like to clarify that many international treaties of this type are just the opposite

. Even those international trade treaties in force from the WTO or WIPO are currently not interpreted as including Software Patents for many nations. For people from such nations (like myself) US Patent law simply has no bearing on our work. They do not exist in our corner of the planet - and so we rarely (I certainly couldn't) verify it against US Law (or being fair, against any nation enforcing Software Patents). That said, Copyrights are the main reason I would agree a CLA is both useful and even necessary. If I signed it though, I'd have to read it a few times and dig around to figure out what that Section 3. clause means for me...

#5 P�draic Brady (Homepage) on 2006-06-28 18:45 (Reply)

This CLA is seriously flawed and anybody who blindly signs it is an idiot. If you work for a company with any sort of patent portfolio and you sign this, then chances are you are opening yourself up to a world of trouble. You are basically giving away the rights to any patents associated with anything you contribute. And while this may sound like a good idea, think about the situation where someone takes a little tiny piece of something you contributed and expands on it. As in, say you contributed something that is 5% of something your company has a patent on. Someone else can then deliberately implement the remaining 95% and validly claim that you have given up the rights to this patent. While most of us are rather anti-patents, chances are your company will not be very happy about you exposing their patent portfolio like this.

#6 Anonymous on 2006-06-30 13:44 (Reply)

It just goes to show how licenses and IP really do matter, and big companies really do take this seriously. This is a good thing, and only goes to strengthen open source licenses

#7 david law (Homepage) on 2006-12-12 07:36 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?