On 3/1/13, Richard Fontana <fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 08:29:14PM -0500, W. Trevor King wrote:
> So I'm not quite sure who owns the copyright, or quite what license
> it's under. Nobody's bothered the Git project about their copy, and
> all of the authors are kernel developers who clearly know about the
> Git project, so I imagine GPLv2 is safe.
I agree with that. However, I regard the DCO proper as public
domain. Maybe the DCO plus the surrounding text should be thought of
as GPLv2.
I wonder if, by explicitly supporting the view that the DCO is
GPLv2-licensed, to the point of including a copy of GPLv2, your
signed-off-by project is less likely to attract interest from any
project using a license other than GPLv2. Until reading this thread it
had never occurred to me that there might be anyone who seriously
thinks that the DCO is subject to any copyright-based restriction. Yet
clearly OSDL did, or so it would seem.
Might be worth contacting the Linux Foundation about this.
FWIW, I admit I have assumed without a doubt that the text of the
DCO itself is non-copyrightable. (and I have copied, modified and made
text public, with acknowledgement for easy recognition).
I'm sorry if that was incorrect. TBH I don't see how it's copyrightable,
since it's several phrases, standard 'agreement' wording, describing
a part of development procedures in use commonly.
Also, afaik it has been 'cut off' from the kernel tree, and there are
many copies and modified copies on the internet. As an example,
a wiki[0], another example in use by HP[1].
Also, projects are using in repositories copies of the DCO[2].
[0]
http://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin
[1]
http://www.openwebosproject.org/community/governance/dco/#certificate
[2]
https://github.com/EllisLab/CodeIgniter/blob/develop/DCO.txt