[gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Poll: Would you sign a Contributer License Agreement?

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 30 May 2018, Greg KH wrote:

> Please please please do not "fork" the DCO.  It was specifically
> designed so that any project can use it, as-is, with no changes
> needed.

We simply cannot. We have files in the Gentoo repository that are not
under a free software license, and for these we need an extra clause.
Otherwise we would have to specify in the policy that certain commits
are excepted from the requirement of a Signed-off-by line, and IMHO
that would be a much worse solution.

Addition of the extra clause for licenses and similar files resulted
from a long discussion on 2018-01-25 in the #gentoo-council channel,
which included three council members and a trustee.

> Yes, some foolish projects have gone off and rewritten it, but that
> was crazy, and they now wish they did not, as it requires corporate
> lawyers to manually have to go review the "new" document to ensure
> that it really is doing what it thinks it is doing.

> Again, please just use the DCO.  It's at it's own web site, and is
> good to be used that way:
> 	https://developercertificate.org/

> Also, note, that if you do decide to copy it, I personally am going
> to get upset as it is a blatent copyright violation.  So there is
> that issue...

How is it a copyright violation? We create a modified version of
a document that was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 2.5 License. Distribution of modified versions is allowed
under this license, and I believe that we include proper attribution.
Also section 4b of CC-BY-SA-2.5 explicitly allows distribution of a
modified work under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

> Hint doing a s/open/free/ on the original text does not mean that
> you suddenly have created a brand new document with no requirement
> to abide by the original document's copyright.  I see you claim that
> it was published in 2005 with a CC-BY-SA-2.5 License?  Do you have
> any reference for that, I know I spent a lot of time working on this
> in the past and I do not remember that...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060524185355/http://www.osdlab.org/newsroom/press_releases/2004/2004_05_24_dco.html

Specifically, its full copyright notice reads:

| © 2005 Open Source Development Labs, Inc. The Developer's
| Certificate of Origin 1.1 is licensed under a Creative Commons
| Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. If you modify you must use a
| name or title distinguishable from "Developer's Certificate of
| Origin" or "DCO" or any confusingly similar name.

Notice the sentence "if you modify ..." which clearly confirms that
modifications are allowed. (If you think that "Gentoo Developer's
Certificate of Origin" isn't a name sufficiently different from the
original, we're certainly open to suggestions.)

> Again, just use the DCO, please.

See above, the simple reason is that we need an exception for license
files.

Then again, Linux might profit from such a clause too. See for example
the following commit:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/LICENSES/preferred/GPL-2.0?id=255247c2770ada6edace04173b35307869b47d99

The commit message carries two Signed-off-by lines (and a Reviewed-by
by yourself). But let's look what the document says about its license:

+ Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
+ of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Clearly, this isn't an open source license, because it doesn't allow
modifications. So I wonder how the committer could certify agreement
to the DCO 1.1 there?

> No, I personally will not sign any CLAs, sorry.

This is interesting, since you had previously signed the copyright
assignment form to Gentoo Technologies, Inc. (To be precise, you PGP
signed it and sent it to recruiters@g.o on 2004-03-08.)

Ulrich