As an employee of a "large corporation", I'll observe that the problem with contributor forms is once you have to sign one, the lawyer has to get involved. Once the lawyer has to get involved, life WILL get complicated. Of any 32 corporations, 27 will have a lawyer who wants to make a small-to-large change, just to suit their particular way of doing things. Then the PSF will have to have a lawyer decide whether those changes are okay for this one-off deal (or maybe whether that change should go into the generic, in which case you have a new thing that a bunch of lawyers have to look at). I actually have, from years ago, a "grandfathered" permission to contribute to Python, from those days when I was actually doing website work, as long as I don't contribute any <insert my big company's name> IP, because I asked for that and got it. So at the moment it's very simple, but if I had to sign a specific contributor agreement, all that good stuff goes away and my business unit lawyer gets involved, and I'd probably lose the permission I now have. In my specific case, that is harmless to Python since I don't contribute to the code base and now also don't contribute to the website, but it's an example: it probably will affect others. IANAL of course, but it seems that implicit agreements often work, and are likely to cause less trouble (by implicit, I mean PSF saying "if you contribute, understand you're doing so under these terms")
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