Subject: Re: Nobody is THE one making contribution

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2020 03:01:12 +0100

On Wed, Dec 23 2020, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> When I express my dissenting opinion I'm not saying nobody should write
> a patch on top of mine. Of course they can. Anybody can take my code and
> do whatever they want with it (as long as they don't violate the license
> of the project).
>
> What they cannot do is add my Signed-off-by line to code I don't agree
> with.

I don't think that's what Signed-off-by means, per SubmittingPatches:

    To improve tracking of who did what, we ask you to certify that you
    wrote the patch or have the right to pass it on under the same
    license as ours, by "signing off" your patch[...under the DCO:
    https://developercertificate.org/]

So I find this rather unlikely, but let's say I author a patch for
git.git and send it to this ML with a Signed-off-by.

If someone else then takes that patch and changes it in a way that I
vehemently disagree with and gets Junio to accept it into git.git in its
altered form, that altered patch should still carry my Signed-off-by, as
well as that of whoever altered it.

Because it's a trailer for maintaining the licensing paper trail. It
doesn't mean "Ævar thinks this patch as it stands is a good idea"[1].

"No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" is an integral part of
free software & open source. In our case it means that when you
contribute code under our COPYING terms someone else might use in a way
you don't approve of.

E.g. I'm sure that arms contractors, totalitarian regimes etc. or other
entities some might disapprove of are using git in some way.

That non-restriction on fields of endeavor also extends to individual
patches licensed under a free software license & the necessity to
maintain a paper trail about who their authors are and if they certified
them under the DCO.

1. As an aside, I haven't needed involvement from others to later
   realize that an integrated patch of mine with my SOB maybe wasn't
   such a good idea after all :)