On 8/11/2013 7:19 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Ben, you are welcome to dislike signing CAs, but please stop spreading FUD about the PSF's CA.
The PSF has 2 Agreements. One for uploading packages to be redistributed as separate packages on PyPI. The other for accepting contributions to the collective work known CPythonx.y. I do not like parts of the package hosting license, but I agree that Ben's complaints about the contribution license are FUDlike.
My claim is factual, not FUD, and is entailed within the terms of the contributor agreement.
I will disagree below.
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.
This is deceptive at best. 1. To the extent that a contribution is substantial enough to have copyright, the copyright explicitly remains with the contributor. This is fairly rare for contributions to collective works. 2. A grant of rights in the contribution to PSF only grants those rights to the PSF. WOW. It cannot be otherwise. But since the grant is explicitly not exclusive, the copyright holder is free to grant the same rights in the contributed word to everyone else in the world. It is the choice of the copyright holder whether to grant special rights to the PSF or to grant the same rights to everyone. If you want, write a generic version of the Academic License version whatever, sign it, and post it and a notice on python list that all your contributions to Python via bugs.python.org are available to anyone under the same conditions. Then PSF will definitely not have any special rights to your words. Of course, your generic license can only apply to your words and not anyone else's. 3. The PSF is the copyright holder of the *collective* work and to that extent, it must, as a practical matter. have 'special rights', just as you have special rights to the words you write. If you want to find unfair-to-author's licenses, look everywhere but the open-source software world. -- Terry Jan Reedy