On Fri, 30 Nov 2007, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > 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.
Without taking a position one way or another on this particular piece of software, which I know nothing about, I can say that I work for a similar company as Rasmus, and I have had similar complications with my legal team over ASF-style CLAs. If they're willing to approve them, they want to edit them first, which, of course, they cannot do -- these are "take it or leave it" legal documents, which no lawyer likes. While those problem can be sometimes worked through, it usually comes down to a risk / reward calculation. Is the risk of opening ourselves up given the perceived vagueness of the CLA worth the return we will get? It's hard to price the risk, but, honestly, I usually price the return pretty low compared to opening up a large public company to potentially losing a valuable patent, which makes it a hard bar to hurdle. I also don't enjoy spending my time this way, which is more of a personal issue than a corporate one, but it does make me less interested in working on those types of projects. As an additional data point, I have had success getting them to agree for us to release internal code under both BSD and CDDL open source licenses, so they are not unfamiliar or unreceptive to these issues and ideas. -adam -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.trachtenberg.com author of o'reilly's "upgrading to php 5" and "php cookbook" avoid the holiday rush, buy your copies today! -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
