I like PHP, I really do. PHP5 is a great language and was a huge step in the right direction, unfortunately the community doesn't agree. It is not that the PHP community thinks PHP5 is bad, it is just that they don't agree on anything really. I am starting to wonder if the lack of cohesion is going to bring real trouble to success of PHP as a language.

Though he admits to no longer writing PHP, he's still interested to see it succeed. He just doesn't see the structure the language/community needs to make this happen and make the languagde advance. Jackson also comments on the fact that there doesn't seem to be one "solid" framework for the language, and that even the Zend offering seems on shaky ground.

He also looks at the "downward spiral" things started taking around the time PHP5 was just coming into view - arguing over petty issues, delays of releases, features being added and removed.

The luster was tarnished and the community hasn't recovered. I hope I am wrong, but it looks like it is not going to improve anytime soon.

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.

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.

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.

He also mentions Gentoo's own struggles with this kind of licensing in the past.]]> Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:07:00 -0600