Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> writes:
On 11 Aug 2013 19:20, "Ben Finney" <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
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.
You're right. For the benefit of this forum: I've discussed this with Nick in person, and we agree that the PSF is in a bind on this matter because of awkward ancient license terms on some code in Python. We'd both prefer that the PSF could accept “license in = license out”, that is, no contributor agreement needed. It seems to me that the Apache License grants PSF everything they need, with no need for a contributor agreement; but neither of us has the legal expertise to know, and without that expertise, it's PSF that bears the risk. So, for what it's worth, I don't have ill will to the PSF on this matter.
[…] 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).
My apologies, I agree this is inappropriate. -- \ “If you continue running Windows, your system may become | `\ unstable.” —Microsoft, Windows 95 bluescreen error message | _o__) | Ben Finney