[Python-ideas] Contributions to official documentation versus contributions to wiki

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/11/2013 7:19 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at 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