On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 8:24 AM, R. David Murray rdmurray@bitdance.com wrote:
Has any progress been made on an electronically signable agreement and/or adding "posting a patch to this tracker means you have the right to contribute it and you do contribute it" language to the tracker?
Note that the latter point (regarding implicit declarations of "right to submit" and actual submission when posting patches to the tracker) is something we're already effectively relying on when incorporating posted patches. The fact that such patches are almost always derivative of the Python source in the first place also significantly reduces the chance of legal hassles.
The situation with committers is different, because each of us can push stuff straight into the source tree without going via the tracker. The only way to keep our noses clean from a legal perspective at that point is to have a contributor agreement in place that covers everything we commit to the main repository.
The contributor-agreements-for-non-committers issue mainly comes up when there is a substantial piece of code that was originally written for something else, that is suggested as a patch to CPython (e.g. the locale neutral number parsing and formatting routines).
Still, Steve's right: when we commit something, *we're* the ones making the assertion that the change is small enough not to need a contributor agreement, so the commit record should reflect that.
If something seems iffy, bring it up on python-dev (preferably cc'ing VanL directly as well).
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia