[Python-ideas] Contributions to official documentation versus contributions to wiki (was: Frequently Rejected Ideas Was: Deprecating rarely used str methods)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 11 Aug 2013 19:20, "Ben Finney" <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>
> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>
> writes:
>
> > Ben Finney writes:
> >
> >  > Normal people are also those who want to avoid the requirement for
> >  > reading and signing a legal document assigning special rights to the
> >  > PSF, just to propose a fix.
> >
> > Ben, you are welcome to dislike signing CAs, but please stop spreading
> > FUD about the PSF's CA.
>
> My claim is factual, not FUD, and is entailed within the terms of the
> contributor agreement.
>
> > The rights explicitly specified in the CA actually constitute
> > *restrictions* on the PSF compared to the rights granted by the
> > licenses themselves.
>
> The contributor agreement grants to PSF the unilateral power to
> redistribute the contribution under “any other open source license
> approved by [the PSF]”, a power not granted to other recipients of the
> contribution. So yes, it arrogates special rights to the PSF.
>
> Does this make the PSF awful? No, of course not. But I can't pretend it
> is acceptable to grant special terms to one party in the community.

We don't do it for fun - we do it because we don't have the right to
relicense some of the previously donated source code, and don't want to
spend the lawyer time needed to determine if we can get by without those
relicensing rights for new contributions while complying with those
existing obligations.

People that care about this can either offer to fund the lawyer time to
figure out if ALv2 contributions could be accepted without relicensing
rights, or accept that Python's complex licensing history means that
contributions on a "licence in = licence out" basis are not currently
considered feasible, and that a desire to contribute solely to projects
with pristine licensing histories is currently incompatible with a desire
to contribute directly to CPython.

It's a pretty simple choice, and I consider it very poor form to use freely
provided PSF communication channels to lobby against a licensing model the
PSF believes it is legally obliged to use (choosing not to contribute
directly yourself is a different story, as that's an individual ethical
decision).

Regards,
Nick.

>
>
> Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>
> writes:
>
> > On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 11:25:41 +1000
> > Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > > Normal people are also those who want to avoid the requirement for
> > > reading and signing a legal document assigning special rights to the
> > > PSF, just to propose a fix.
> >
> > I don't think we ask for a CLA when someone submits a 10-line patch.
>
> Not true, at least in my experience. I have been asked to submit a
> contributor agreement for small patches to the documentation. Since I
> cannot in good conscience accept the PSF's requirements, they reject
> such contributions even under an acceptable all-parties-equal license.
>
> --
>  \      “As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely |
>   `\       upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.” —Bertrand |
> _o__)                                Russell, _Unpopular Essays_, 1950 |
> Ben Finney
>
> _______________________________________________
> Python-ideas mailing list
> Python-ideas at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20130811/bedde733/attachment.html>