@fontana, I've heard Noller say that Redhat wanted PSF to do a CLA as well, and it really surprised me. I think Steve Holden was the first person I heard say this.
FWIW, I've been kicking around the Free Software community longer than both of them (although Steve is around my age, he was in the proprietary Unix community for longer), and I don't recall this at all!
In fact, if anyone deserves credit for paying attention to the licensing of issues Python earlier than anyone, it's FSF. I remember one of my very first political negotiations for FSF when I became Executive Director was with Guido over dealing with those goofy set of Python licenses that his various employers had created. (But that's a licensing issue, not CLA).
@bkuhn that's disturbing, unless perhaps Noller and Holden are referring to something from the Webbink Era (which seems kind of unlikely chronologically).
BTW Red Hat has never signed the PSF's contributor agreement, though a few individual Red Hat developers have. It's not the worst CLA in the world but it's a little strange, in the category I once called "minimalist CLAs".
PSF understandably has a long-term issue to deal with in sorting through the Python license stack mess that you refer to, and I once had a conversation with Van Lindberg about that, although that itself does not explain why a CLA is necessary. Contributions to CPython going forward could just be licensed in under the Apache License.
I can't seem to find the exact message from Jesse Noller where he invoked Red Hat gratuitously but here's my somewhat annoyed reply:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-legal-sig/2013-August/000037.html
BTW Red Hat has never signed the PSF's contributor agreement, though a few individual Red Hat developers have. It's not the worst CLA in the world but it's a little strange, in the category I once called "minimalist CLAs".
PSF understandably has a long-term issue to deal with in sorting through the Python license stack mess that you refer to, and I once had a conversation with Van Lindberg about that, although that itself does not explain why a CLA is necessary. Contributions to CPython going forward could just be licensed in under the Apache License.
I can't seem to find the exact message from Jesse Noller where he invoked Red Hat gratuitously but here's my somewhat annoyed reply:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-legal-sig/2013-August/000037.html