[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.3.0 released

Luis R. Rodriguez mcgrof at do-not-panic.com
Tue May 21 04:33:45 UTC 2013


On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 8:31 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 10:57:44AM -0400, W. Trevor King wrote:
>> This sort of thing makes me want to ask for commit message tags like:
>>
>>   Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random at developer.example.org>
>>   License: copyleft-next 0.3.0[, possible additional licenses]
>>   Syntax: signed-off-by x.y.z
>>
>> Then you could safely cherry-pick commits with compatible licenses,
>> without having to worry about the context in the project you're
>> cherry-picking from.  It would also make it easy to audit the project:
>>
>>   $ git log | grep '^License:' | sort | uniq
>>
>> I can dream ;).
>
> I think Bradley Kuhn (say, where is ...) once proposed something
> similar to this.

To be clear for historical record -- given a review by SFLC on our
effort to help share code for ath5k with the OpenBSD community and a
possible concern over people not knowing exactly what the
Signed-off-by tag meant, defined under the Developer Certificate of
Origin (DCO) in the Linux kernel, I countered with a suggestion to use
the Change-licensed-under tag for permissive license content on the
the Linux kernel [0]. If you git log the kernel you will find it. In
practice it never caught on mainly because people using the
Signed-off-by tag already knew that the DCO provided language that
indicated the files you were making contributions to were being made
under the file's existing license. In practice then the
Changes-licensed-under tag never caught on and it proved to be more
scalable to instead ensure every contributor knew WTF Signed-off-by
tag meant. This proved to be fun: senior engineers sent us to hell,
ensuring they knew WTF it meant. New developers knew what it meant too
and frankly its at this point silly to fathom Kernel developers who
don't know WTF it means.

Of course though as may be clear from other threads on copyleft-next
the DCO is useful for other projects too and hence the effort to make
it a standalone project and folding its language evolution through
copyleft-next mailing list [1].

So if your project uses the DCO its implied your changes are
respecting the original license. Having content in a file licensed
under different licenses seems wicked complex and likely problematic.

[0] http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Wireless_Project_Suggests_Changes-licensed-under_Tag
[1] https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/2013-May/000666.html

  Luis


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