Subject: Re: Signed-off-by & the law

From: Collin Funk <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:29:39 -0700

"D. Ben Knoble" <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 4:55 PM Collin Funk <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>
>> "D. Ben Knoble" <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>> > Any contributors/users with an interest in law feel like taking a stab
>> > at answering "Is Git's signed-off-by legally useful" ?
>> > https://law.stackexchange.com/q/111158/26698
>> >
>> > Having a solid reference answer is usually a good thing, if one exists.
>>
>> Not sure if it has ever been a topic in court, but it would allow you to
>> argue that committers signed off to the DCO acknowledging that they have
>> the ability to contribute the work under an open source license [1]. In
>> other words, the they have confirmed the work is not owned by their
>> employers, as is often the case with Software Developers in the US [2].
>
> As Junio points out, this is dependent on the project attaching a DCO
> meaning to the sign-off.

Yes, I should have mentioned that, thanks. The DCO meaning is what I see
99% of the time, so my writing assumed it.

>> That is why I prefer copyright assignments. I have done many various GNU
>> projects that I commit to. I feel, at least in GNU's case, that they
>> force you to consider whether an employer may own your work [3]. If so,
>> the FSF will request your employer sign your copyright assignment.
>>
>> Obviously, the assignment process is time consuming and a barrier to
>> entry for new contributors. For that reason some GNU projects, such as
>> glibc and binutils, allow you to send patches with "Signed-off-by" to
>> the DCO if you do not have a copyright assignment nowadays [4].
>
> Less germane to the original question: I'm less familiar with
> copyright assignment, but it seems relatively heavyweight here. It
> seems ironic to me that GNU would want me to give up my own rights
> when contributing to their project ;)

I think this section from an article written by the FSF addresses your
concern [1]:

    Some developers worry that assigning copyright will strip them of
    all their rights to the code they've created. To address this, the
    FSF includes a "license grantback" to the developer in the agreement
    contract. For the developer, a license grantback means they can
    continue to modify and share their code, and technically, they could
    even distribute their software under a different license. In other
    words, by assigning copyright to the FSF, the developer does not
    give up any of these sorts of rights.

All of my assignments have a grantback clause. So you could use
changes/improvements you make to a program elsewhere under a different
license.

Collin

[1] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2022/fall/copyright-assignment-with-the-fsf