There is, for better or worse, no bright line about what is copyrightable. Unfortunately, a lot of the standard is "how deep are the pockets of the opposing party?" If you are Oracle and you want to sue Google, code which any normal person world consider trivial becomes precious intellectual property. Likewise, if you are Microsoft and you can find a proxy in SCO to sabotage Linux. If I, as a self-employed freelancer, contribute a couple lines to Python without a CLA, I'm not going to sue anyone. But if I accept a job with some huge tech company and sign standard employee agreements, they might, even against my wishes. On Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 10:39 AM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 2:25 AM Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:30:41 -0500 Kyle Stanley <aeros167@gmail.com> wrote:
In that case I'm not sure the author ought to get credit for the PR.
They
can file a bug pointing out the typo and someone else can submit a fix.
That sounds like a reasonable solution to me; even for more substantial issues (if signing the CLA is a genuine issue). I think there are a fair number of individuals out there who just want to fix something and aren't concerned with attributions or long-term contributions; they just want to fix the issue for themselves or perhaps for altruistic reasons.
I'd like to point out that the relevant perspective here isn't PSF policy as much as copyright law. Something as trivial as a typo fix for sure isn't copyrightable, so there's no point in requiring a CLA for it. For more involved changes, things are less clear, and a court would be the final authority; but that's admittedly an argument for erring on the side of caution and requiring a CLA for *any* non-trivial change.
I don't think anyone disputes that the CLA is needed for any non-trivial change. The question is, what constitutes a non-trivial change? Is it subjective? What's the smallest copyrightable edit (which may or may not be related to the smallest copyrightable piece of text)? Does it depend on context - is fixing a link more trivial than fixing a piece of English?
It'd be great to get a lawyer's firm stance on this. On the PEPs repo, I've merged a good few simple PRs, and don't want to be putting the PSF into legal trouble.
ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/KNX3ZIQK... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/