You need to sign a CLA to contribute a typo patch to Zend

Is the implication that this is the wrong thing for them to do? Could you say more about why? It seems like the most basic protection against copyright-related legal issues to me...

That's a bit... dumb, and is going to turn off other fixes like this. not multi line patches, but TYPO fixes.

but then again, zend is 'enterprise class' and you need lots of red tape to be 'enterprise ready'

if they were smart, they'd just include the fix in another patch and say something like 'oops, already pushed an identical fix', cause you know, you can't copyright a correction to a typo.

What's wrong with that? To protect yourself from copyright claims this should be a normal practice in this crazy world of legal regulations and lawyers disturbing engineers in their work.

Reading, signing, scanning and e-mailing this nice 2-page agreement should not take more than 15 mins, and it's a one-time effort to become a committer. Then both sides are set.