The CLA, did everybody sign it and is it still appropriate

Yep the foundation has to be registered by a few people and then should Diaspora Inc transfer the trademark and remove the CLA. They have to do the legal steps.
@Sean can you report their opinion!? And I am interested if they at all want to be foundation members which would be great of course.

Is the CLA even really necessary at this point? If not, I can talk to Max about dissolving it.

I don't have a problem with the CLA. After reading it again to make sure I wasn't missing anything, I don't see anything that assigns copyright to Diaspora, Inc. In fact, by signing the CLA you're giving Diaspora, Inc. a more limited license to your contributions than you're giving the rest of the world since they specifically can't use the MIT license to make this a close-source project and they also can't make any special commercial dual-licensing deals with anyone (which they could, if they owned the copyright to 100% of the code).

Uh.. gee, what about this?

--> The purpose of the agreement is to give us the rights we need to steward development of the Diaspora™ Software effectively, while providing you assurances that we will use your contributions in the interests of the community of Diaspora™ Software developers.
 <----

What about the USERS? What about the PODMINS?

Anyone care to clarify this for me?

It's a little confusing to me.

Is it possible to use the software in keeping with "the interests of the community of Diaspora™ Software developers" but not in keeping with the interests of the users?

Just asking...

This agreement only applies to developers submitting code. It guarantees that such contributions can be released under MIT license. Without this we wouldn't be able to give back to the Ruby community in a license compatible with most other Ruby libraries.

It is not a charter or end-user license agreement.

@ Jeremy, I understand that it's about the developers, believe me! :)

The questions I'm asking I know show I am wading in over my head. But I don't have an issue about it. Please forgive my my ignorance, but also know that in discussing this, we are laying down text that other people who come behind us may want to understand but do not know who to ask, or when to ask.

So the question is what happens if D-devs use your code in a way that is OK with you, but it's not OK with the end users or the podmins?

For example, and I'm agnostic on this so I don't have an agenda, back in December (was it?) there was a decision to move from jQuery to backbone. It may have been the right move, but from what I understand, there was no discussion even with the community devs about it, much less with podmins, and it ended up causing a huge hassle down the line.

I imagine that what D devs did was within their purview of the CLA, but it upset a lot of people. At least I think I witnessed that.

How do we know that something like this won't happen again? Of course we all want the best for the project, but if this new direction is to be more open than let it be more open.

I should actually restate the above question to say, how can we prevent that form happening again? A lot of trust was spent from that happening and a lot of anguish caused.

I'd really like to see Diaspora to be a non-zerosum game. That's all.