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

W. Trevor King wking at tremily.us
Wed Feb 27 01:29:14 UTC 2013


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].  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:

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?

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.

Cheers,
Trevor

p.s. I'm not on the list, so please CC me in replies.

[1]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1397613/focus=1400065

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