John, of course "stealing" code is bad and I am fine that developers can get sued for that and its good if the users of the code cannot get sued for that. So the question is what license the code is under. If its BSD licensed, than there should really be nothing from stopping you to take that code and put it into another project (while keeping with all the mandates of the BSD license). And to me it seems that "clean IP" always implies writing everything from scratch, though I do not know if this is really required from a legal perspective.

At any rate, the key point of my post is about the patent aspect, which you seem to be dangerously oblivious to. This one is not about "stealing" in the sense that there is no way for you to not know you are stealing. With today's patents you can be violating a patent by just using your head to think something up. Something that might seem so insignificant to you (like one click shopping) that you do not even consider that anyone could have gotten a patent on this ..

Lukas, could you please tell me which Zend/ZF representative/s you heard talking about the Zend Framework CLA at this conference? I was not aware that there was anyone attending the conference that should be considered an authority on the ZF CLA. I'd love to address your concerns; let's make sure this discussion can be as productive as possible by getting the right people in to it.

Thanks.
,Wil

@Wil: I have talken to many many people on this. All the companies that have been putting CLA's in place in the PHP community have been approached by me. This covers Zend, eZ, IBM, Oracle .. you name it.

All have given the same arguments:

• Its about the security of the users of the code
• If you are a good guy, you have nothing to worry about

Now as I have said, I take issue with putting the security of end users above that of the developers. I feel that if a developer gets sued for a software patent, all the end users should stand together behind that developer, instead of just having some other developer rewrite the code in question and leaving the original developer in the dust. And of course software patents have nothing to do with being a good guy or not. You can never talk to anyone in the world and still "break" patents.