ANN: PSF Contribution Documents

[Bengt Richter]

On Fri, 15 Feb 2002 11:32:10 +0100, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at lemburg.com> wrote:

>The Python Software Foundation (PSF; http://www.python.org/psf/) 
>was created to (eventually) hold the intellectual property (IP)
>for the Python programming language.
>
>In order to be able to succeed in this, contributions to the
>Python programming language will have to be covered by legally
>valid contribution agreements. To make this process as simple
>as possible, the PSF members have come up with three different
>contribution agreements.
>
>The current versions of those agreements have been posted to
>a new mailing list at:
>
>    http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/psf-forms-discuss
>
>If you want to participate in the final discussion of these
>documents, please sign up to the list.
>
I skimmed the agreements. Committers' agreements are a bit special
in that they cover access etc., but for declaring the legal copyright
status of a chunk of text, I wish there was something as apparently
simple as saying "I hereby put this in the public domain," but for
defining and transferring rights in detail.

What I'd like to see is an agreement/license/whatever-boilerplate
repository, kept as files with names in the form

<license version iso-date>.<small ID>.<MD5 digest of file read in binary>.txt

together with a law that would make it possible to include them
by reference and have the thus included text have the same legal
effect as if literally pasted in in the place of the referring line.

The law would let you say "All rights governed by "<repository file name>"
In place of the usual "All rights reserved."

If desired, the MD5 digest can easily be encoded as all alpha ([a-zA-Z])
in 24 characters by a simple base 52 trick on groups of hex bytes making
3 chars from 4. The '.txt' extension is to make it easy in that world.

But the main idea is a repository (with enough mirrors and random copies
that google can find the exact file by its unique name, which also
guarantees by the MD5 part of the name a way to check content integrity,
which in turn would seem to be a decent basis for legal effect, though
IANAL.

I just hate seeing source code with more boilerplate than substance.
I would think with the right wording in a repository file, a developer
should be able to confer ownership of copyright and licensing terms all
with one line (ok, it's a bit longish - maybe make "All rights ..." legal
in the immediately following line) in a posted source file, e.g.

# Copyright (C) 2002 by author.
# All rights governed by "2001-05-01.PSFLic2a.asdasdasdasdasdasdasdasd.txt"

Signing the referring source file with pgp would guarantee that the reference
line was an unaltered part of the whole. (That problem exists whether the
full copyright terms are literally pasted in or included by reference).

Making it easy to do a standard thing might make it more common and uniform.

The government could have an official boilerplate registry site at
the Library of Congress, so a particular mirror would not have to be mentioned.

Any IAALs out there care to comment?

Regards,
Bengt Richter