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

Luis R. Rodriguez mcgrof at do-not-panic.com
Tue Feb 26 23:23:28 UTC 2013


On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> 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.

At one point I wanted to volunteer you to forking it but W. King did it first :)

>> 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. :)

And here I thought attorneys love verbiage. I can see good attorneys
prefer only just the amount of verbiage necessary ;)

> 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.

Neat, thanks for considering it! Full speed ahead! BTW if the DCO fork
has too much verbiage then perhaps it can be shortened, and this has
me thinking too -- if perhaps we need a mailing list for the DCO's
advancement / changes, and if this is all related if we can just use
one mailing list for both.

  Luis


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