[Python-legal-sig] Tired of this CLA pressure (Was: Iterative development)

[anatoly techtonik]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 12:29 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 29/01/2014 07:44, anatoly techtonik wrote:
>>
>> Yet another idea that some of you will find strange.
>>
>
> Instead of coming up with ideas, why not sign the contributors' agreement
> and come up with code that people can actually use?

Because PSF lawyers don't want to cooperate with explaining CLA in open
way, and I don't want to sign the papers I don't understand. I''ve made several
attempts to simplify things to understand, from comparing Python docs
contributions to Wikipedia contributions, and by providing alternative "My CLA"
text, but so far I don't even have a list the problems with my
proposals from the
legal part.

I now think that if PSF can not coordinate work to remove legal obstacles in
proper way (and not forcing peers to pursue and kill those who don't obey),
with all its connections to such open source proponents as Canonical and
Google, then the only proper way would be to open Kickstarter campaign
with the title "Explain My CLA" that will fund an escape hatch for Python to
get rid of license stack and make the problems of current copyright system
more obvious to the rest of the world. I think that Creative Commons would be
a good party to work on this. I am even willing to participate in a user,
"customer" and "product owner" role, because if I dig too deep into legal
system, I may have become a lawyer myself, and I don't what (as a citizen)
to be a lawyer to understand the documents that I sign.