Wez Furlong posted a request for comments to the php.internals and php.pdo mailing lists yesterday about a new ly proposed update to the current PDO functionality - PDO 2. He just wants to clear up a few things...

It became apparent over the past year or so that PDO has been a good and valuable addition to PHP. [...] We believe that having direct involvement from the data access providers would be most effective, which is why we set out to try and get them on board.

There were three steps they would need to make to push things to version two (documentation, define scope/direction and organize data provider integration methods) and the proposal that has caused a huge stir in the community - the idea of requiring a CLA contributors would need to sign.

Comments to this point from the community include:

• Richard Thomas
• Antony Dovgal
• some of Wez's own comments
• Mike Willbanks
• Christopher Jones
• Lukas Smith
• Paul Jones
• Pierre-Alain Joye
• Jay Pipes
• Derick Rethans
• Marco Tabini
• Kristian Kohntopp
• Some PDO humor from David Coallier and Travis Swicegood
• Marcus Borger (and his part two)
• Richard Heyes
• Till's blog entry
• Say No to the CLA

Markus Wolff takes a look at a part of the setup surrounding the Zend Framework in this blog post today - the Framework's CLA.

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.

He quotes from the CLA's FAQ on the Framework site about the protection this CLA offers to both the Framework and to the developers that contribute to it.

His rebuttal is one of "how can this be enforced?", which, of course, he realizes is just not possible. He casts a "marketing first" light on the CLA, suggesting that it's just a way to help sell it to corporations.