Re: DCO or Copyright Assignment? Why not both...

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

* Siddhesh Poyarekar:

>> My opinion is that a Co-authored-by: should be equivalent to multiple
>> Signed-off-by: lines e.g. treat Co-authored-by: as an alias to
>> Signed-off-by:, but those projects not wishing to use the implied DCO
>> can use Co-authroed-by.
>>   
>> We should probably move this off this thread.
>
> Done, subject line changed.

The FSF needs to be involved.  Typical contributor agreements (with our
without copyright assignment) offer some guidance what contributes a
contribution.  For example, it's common to say that everything that the
contributor submits to the project using project resources is a
contribution unless marked with “NOT A CONTRIBUTION”.  We cannot know
what FSF assignment contracts say on this matter, which is why we need
input from the FSF.

In the past, there was considerable confusion among GNU maintainers what
constitutes a contribution.  For example, some maintainers assumed that
they could talk a patch which was posted by some person with the same
name and assume that copyright had been assigned for it if the file on
fencepost lists a person of that name.  I do not know if this has been
improved, by teaching GNU maintainers about the complexities of software
copyright and authorship.

Thanks,
Florian