[Python-Dev] Deciding against the CLA (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Apr 15 16:14:50 CEST 2013

Can we get this discussion off python-dev? It's not going to change, and this is not the forum to express your disagreement.

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 12:15 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> writes:

On 13/04/13 20:30, Ben Finney wrote: > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes: >> A failure to sign the CLA is already a decision not to contribute >> to the distribution > > As someone who cannot in good faith sign the CLA, that > characterisation is far from accurate: I would very much like to > contribute to the Python distribution, and so have not decided as > you describe.

Could you explain, briefly, why you cannot sign the CLA? Because software freedom in a work is undermined when any recipient is granted special legal privilege in the work. As it currently stands, the Contributor Agreement grants special legal privilege in the work (the power to unilaterally re-license the work) to the PSF. By “special privilege”, I mean that this power is granted specially to some but denied to all other recipients of the work. Hence to sign the Contributor Agreement as it currently stands is to undermine software freedom in the resulting work. -- \ “Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what | `\ mnemonic means, you've got a problem.” —Larry Wall | o) |_ Ben Finney

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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