My question Does anyone curate a list of boilerplate terms-of-service? has been put on hold. I would like to counter the issues raised, and ask for it to be re-opened.
I am also open to suggestions to:
- simplify the question (I front-loaded it in attempt to prevent it from being put on hold)
- salvage the question (if the consensus is that adding something will put it back on topic)
My counterclaims:
ToS are off-topic (only copyright licenses are on-topic). ToS can and do interact with copyright (example: How does GitHub's "forking right" cope with an "All rights reserved" project? ) as do contributor-agreements and other legal mechanisms (DMCA, DRM...). Thus ToS (and my question in particular) affects "understanding, applying, and complying with Free & Open licenses".
ToS are off-topic (not relevant to the free/libre/open community). Networked services that require that a user agrees to ToS are ubiquitous. Members of our community use these services to to create, share, modify and sell collaborative works. Thus ToS (and my question in particular) affects "how communities collaborate together to produce, distribute, market and sometime monetize these projects".
OP needs a lawyer. I'm not asking for a legal evaluation, I'm asking if there is an organization that creates and/or comments on legal documents. Just like the FSF or Creative Commons create licenses, or the OSI or Definition of Free Cultural Works approve/comment on them. Thus I'm asking about an organization that draws on or has ties to "the history and philosophies of the FSF, OSI, CC etc". (Specifically the "etc" part ;)
The answer is "there is no such organization". That's a valid answer to (imho) a valid question. It's the answer I came to in my research. The reason I posted here was to get external input (did I miss something?) and/or provide my own well-researched answer.
Post script: Since posting, I have also followed some of my own advice and a) simplified the question and b) focused on the interaction between ToS and copyright/collaboration. On reflection this stack is limited to copyright/collaboration and not user rights in general.