On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 08:29:14PM -0500, W. Trevor King wrote:
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> BTW I understand why wking naturally believes the DCO and accompanying
> language are licensed under GPLv2, but this seems rather questionable
> to me as to the DCO itself, at least.
Why does it seem questionable to you?
It was questionable to me because of an OSDL posting mentioning
CC-BY-SA-2.5-generic, so I asked on linux-kernel@ and off, but I
didn't get a very clear response [1].
That's interesting; I hadn't noticed the old license (even though I've
looked at that OSDL posting) and haven't even thought about the idea
that the DCO (the DCO proper at least) might be GPLv2-licensed until
now.
The best I got was:
On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 02:39:39PM -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> Using it in the Git project, which has the same license as the kernel,
> should be fine, so there's no problem there.
This is why I thought I'd use the GPLv2 for the signed-off-by
repository too. The ambiguity is mostly due to the OSDL posting I
reference in my initial post [1], but none of the authors I contacted
(and I emailed everyone from every commit I cherry-picked) explicitly
confirmed or denied the OSDL's claim, and Greg defended Linus'
copyright (sort of) on the DCO itself:
I seem to recall James Bottomley saying on the Harmony list (the
later, non-CHR one) that Diane Peters authored the original version of
the DCO while she was general counsel of OSDL.
On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 02:39:39PM -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 04:58:53PM -0500, W. Trevor King wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 01:02:25PM -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > Copyright ownership owned by OSDL were transferred to the Linux
> > > Foundation when the foundation changed names and structure a
> > > number of years ago, in case you were curious about that.
> >
> > Thanks, I'll assign Linus' D-C-O copyright to the LF.
>
> No, you can't do that at all, you don't know who owns Linus's
> copyrights, only he does, just like I don't know who owns your
> copyrights. Also, why does that matter here?
Well, Greg may be right to ask why it matters.
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.
- RF