[copyleft-next] Section 4 and 7 - permissive license contenand development process

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Tue Feb 26 23:17:42 UTC 2013


On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 02:24:51PM -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> 3) The last question has to do with development process and licensing.
> Section 7 has language that asserts that if patches are submitted that
> it will be assumed the contribution is being made under the same
> license unless otherwise stated. This is good, however I invite you to
> please review and consider the effort behind the signed-off-by fork
> [2] by W. Trevor King that was spawned after discussions of the
> potential of forking the Signed-off-by Developer Certificate of Origin
> on the Linux kernel [3]. 

Ah, I wasn't aware of this.

> What I wonder is if a merge of such / similar
> language onto copyleft-next may help with development process
> therefore making an understanding and respect of development process
> through licensing, thereby making the requirement of a Signed-off-by
> tag perhaps not required.
> 
> Thoughts?

I actually thought about something like this as a different way of
doing section 7. But I haven't thought about it too concretely until
reading your message. The problem with the kernel's version of the DCO
is it's kind of verbose. :)

The thing that bothers me about this a little bit is that the DCO
approach is nice in what it's missing, and the Apache License 2.0
approach is nice in what it's missing too. If you combine the two, you
might get something less nice. But maybe it's worthwhile in view of
the current and possibly future climate around contributor agreements
and such.

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.

Anyhow, we should certainly look into this as a possible improvement
to current section 7.

 - RF


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