PDO 2 and CLA

You may be aware that we're starting discussions on the future of PDO; despite being pretty good for many common uses, it isn't perfect, and we want to improve it. One of the items to be discussed is whether we can or should adopt a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which will make it simpler for the database vendors to work together with us on PDO.

The discussion is aimed chiefly at the "core developer" community, that is, the people that are working on the internals code for PHP, because the CLA would impact how they contribute to PDO. The broader PHP user/developer community would not be affected by a CLA (if we were to go that route), as it would not affect their ability to use PDO in their applications.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, you might be interested in reading the transcript of a conversation I had on IRC this evening; you can find it below. It's between myself and a few members of the PHP Community IRC channel on FreeNode (used with their permission!), and I think it does a good job of explaining in fairly simple and somewhat unbiased terms a couple of the main arguments for and against the CLA. I'm not saying that this is all there is to it, just that these are likely to be the main points that the core developers need to discuss first.

It would be premature to say that you are for or against PDO 2 at this stage because we are yet to define what PDO 2 will actually be; that is the purpose of the discussion on the PDO mailing list.

If, after reading this, you have questions or comments of your own, then please read the email that Andi and myself put together, take a look at the FAQ, and if your question is still unanswered, join the discussion on the PDO mailing list (read the archives first!) Browse it via the web, over NNTP, or subscribe via email.

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Syndicated 2008-01-25 05:35:29 from Evil, as in Dr.