Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Planet PHP has been abuzz all weekend since the first preview release of the new Zend Framework. It’s a preview, so what’s there can hopefully only get better

One thing I don’t think has had fair praise has been the Contributor License Agreement. Anyone who wants to commit to the Framework has to sign the Contributor License Agreement first. If you’re using someone else’s code in your product, it’s important to know that all the third-party code is their’s to relicense in the first place. It’s one less thing to worry about when you’re trying to sleep at night (And, in a scripting language like PHP, where anyone can audit the code you ship to your customers, it’s a fair worry)

As the FAQ says, if you contribute code to the framework, you’re not signing over all rights to your code to Zend. It’s still your code; you’ve just granted Zend a license to use the code in the framework. That’s very generous of Zend - they could easily have used their position to gobble up all the rights to all contributions. But I think that it’ll also turn out to be the keystone that makes the Zend Framework much more successful than the alternatives.

Getting this sort of thing right isn’t easy. Gentoo’s had its own problems with a copyright assignment agreement for new developers a couple of years back (which I believe still haven’t been totally resolved). Maybe we should take a look at what Zend have done here, and see what we can learn?