[tsc-devel] Signing-off commits on legal questions

Quintus | Sun, 01 Feb 2015 21:13:59 UTC

Hi everyone,

as the need recently occured with the Bugsbane graphics that missed any
license, but were clearly directed towards inclusion into the TSC
project, I have added a section to the conventions document describing
the signoff procedure to employ for such edge cases in commit
8d6aaeef0ad7d358f0e48165bfcf0be9f24f6847. I’d like to have feedback from
you, espacially I’d like to have feedback from Luiji (if you find the
time), because it refers to you as the assistant lead.

The problem that this strives to solve is the case that you would like
to add some kind of contribution to the repository but don’t know
whether it’s legally acceptable to do that. I acknowledge that by my
position as the project leader it’s on me to make the final decision
whether to include such questionable content or not (unless we
mystically get a lawyer into our team). By signing off the contribution,
I acknowledge that to best of my knowledge it is legally OK. This lifts
the burden of responsibility for inclusion of such a contribution from
you while I take it on me. A “signoff” is a part of metadata in a Git
commit with the meaning of “the person who signed this off has affirmed
something”, as opposed to the bare author metadata that identifies the
person who created the content of the commit; thus the signoff
information would be superfluous if “author” and “signoff” refer to the
same person. By the definition in the conventions document I added with
the above commit, for our project a “signoff” now means that the
contribution is legally acceptable from the point of view of the
maintainer who signs off. All signoffs I do have a ditial signature of
my GPG key (B1FE 958E D5E8 468E AA20  8F4B F1D8 799F BCC8 BC4F) attached
to verify their integrity.

I do hope that we will not get much of these edge cases like with
Bugsbane. But it’s better to be prepared rather than having to deal with
the problem when it arises.

Valete,
Quintus

-- 
Blog: http://www.quintilianus.eu

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