[pydotorg-www] PSF Contributor form

[Brian Curtin]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 18:02, Mats Wichmann <mats at wichmann.us> wrote:
>
> As an employee of a "large corporation", I'll observe that the problem
> with contributor forms is once you have to sign one, the lawyer has to
> get involved.  Once the lawyer has to get involved, life WILL get
> complicated.  Of any 32 corporations, 27 will have a lawyer who wants to
> make a small-to-large change, just to suit their particular way of doing
> things.  Then the PSF will have to have a lawyer decide whether those
> changes are okay for this one-off deal (or maybe whether that change
> should go into the generic, in which case you have a new thing that a
> bunch of lawyers have to look at).  I actually have, from years ago, a
> "grandfathered" permission to contribute to Python, from those days when
> I was actually doing website work, as long as I don't contribute any
> <insert my big company's name> IP, because I asked for that and got it.
> So at the moment it's very simple, but if I had to sign a specific
> contributor agreement, all that good stuff goes away and my business
> unit lawyer gets involved, and I'd probably lose the permission I now
> have.  In my specific case, that is harmless to Python since I don't
> contribute to the code base and now also don't contribute to the
> website, but it's an example: it probably will affect others.  IANAL of
> course, but it seems that implicit agreements often work, and are likely
> to cause less trouble (by implicit, I mean PSF saying "if you
> contribute, understand you're doing so under these terms")

At least one reason why we require explicit agreement (the one I'm
most familiar with) is to keep track of all contributors in the event
that we need to change the licensing terms, or change the license all
together. As far as I know, this is not open for debate -- it's a
requirement for us.