Legal question: Author, Sign-off, Company Copyright and gmail

Legal question: Author, Sign-off, Company Copyright and gmail

[Daniel Lezcano]

Hi all,

I noticed a practice when the patches are submitted where I'm a bit
confused about how it fits with the DCO.

People are creating gmail accounts to send patches on behalf of their
company because the company's email configuration does not allow to send
patches or adds extra infos, or whatever...

That ends up with patches submitted by a gmail account with no history
and verifiable origin and new files containing a company copyright [1].

At the first glance I would say, it is not allowed, and if a company is
willing to do opensource, it should provide the tools to its employees
to do so. But I don't want block patch submission if this practice is
tolerated.

What is the policy in this case ?

Thanks in advance.

  -- Daniel

[1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10045815/

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Re: Legal question: Author, Sign-off, Company Copyright and gmail

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:45:27AM +0100, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I noticed a practice when the patches are submitted where I'm a bit
> confused about how it fits with the DCO.
> 
> People are creating gmail accounts to send patches on behalf of their
> company because the company's email configuration does not allow to send
> patches or adds extra infos, or whatever...
> 
> That ends up with patches submitted by a gmail account with no history
> and verifiable origin and new files containing a company copyright [1].

If there is a question, just ask.

> At the first glance I would say, it is not allowed, and if a company is
> willing to do opensource, it should provide the tools to its employees
> to do so. But I don't want block patch submission if this practice is
> tolerated.

Fixing the use of a company's email server is outside of almost all
Linux kernel divisions.  As one such example, Red Hat has a system that
messes with patches :)

I only know of one company that uses Exchange that has "fixed it" enough
to allow their developers to send patches out that are not corrupted
(and no, it's not Microsoft).  Preventing all of those companies, or
those that use Lotus Notes, or any other horrid email system, from
contributing to kernel development is not a good idea.

> What is the policy in this case ?

I just ask all new contributors who they work for, and so we then know,
it's not that big of a deal.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: Legal question: Author, Sign-off, Company Copyright and gmail

[Daniel Lezcano]

On 09/11/2017 11:44, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:45:27AM +0100, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I noticed a practice when the patches are submitted where I'm a bit
>> confused about how it fits with the DCO.
>>
>> People are creating gmail accounts to send patches on behalf of their
>> company because the company's email configuration does not allow to send
>> patches or adds extra infos, or whatever...
>>
>> That ends up with patches submitted by a gmail account with no history
>> and verifiable origin and new files containing a company copyright [1].
> 
> If there is a question, just ask.
> 
>> At the first glance I would say, it is not allowed, and if a company is
>> willing to do opensource, it should provide the tools to its employees
>> to do so. But I don't want block patch submission if this practice is
>> tolerated.
> 
> Fixing the use of a company's email server is outside of almost all
> Linux kernel divisions.  As one such example, Red Hat has a system that
> messes with patches :)
> 
> I only know of one company that uses Exchange that has "fixed it" enough
> to allow their developers to send patches out that are not corrupted
> (and no, it's not Microsoft).  Preventing all of those companies, or
> those that use Lotus Notes, or any other horrid email system, from
> contributing to kernel development is not a good idea.
> 
>> What is the policy in this case ?
> 
> I just ask all new contributors who they work for, and so we then know,
> it's not that big of a deal.

Thanks for your quick answer and clarification.

  -- Danie


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Re: Legal question: Author, Sign-off, Company Copyright and gmail

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:45:27AM +0100, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I noticed a practice when the patches are submitted where I'm a bit
> confused about how it fits with the DCO.
> 
> People are creating gmail accounts to send patches on behalf of their
> company because the company's email configuration does not allow to send
> patches or adds extra infos, or whatever...
> 
> That ends up with patches submitted by a gmail account with no history
> and verifiable origin and new files containing a company copyright [1].
> 
> At the first glance I would say, it is not allowed, and if a company is
> willing to do opensource, it should provide the tools to its employees
> to do so. But I don't want block patch submission if this practice is
> tolerated.

Note that git send-email will automatically take care of this case by
taking the From field from the author field of git, and moving it into
the body.  So you might have an e-mail message which looks like this:

From: <user.lastname>@gmail.com
Subject: [PATCH] some patch
Date: April 1, 2017
Other-mail-headers: etc. etc.

From: User Lastname <luser@company.with.busted.exchange.server.net>

This is some patch!

...

And then git apply-patch will automatically use the first From field
in the "pseudo-header" instead of the From field in the mail header.

Other people will do this because they they have a username@kernel.org
account, and they want all of their Kernel git commits to have
username@kernel.org in the author field, so they'll do the same thing
of putting "From: username@kernel.org" as the first line of the body
--- either manually, or by setting the appropriate git configuration
variables so that username@kernel.org gets used as the author
information in the git commit.

So what e-mail you use when you interact with the kernel mailing
lists, what e-mail address you want to show up in the git commit's
author field, and which company should get credit for your
contributions for a given period of time in the Linux Foundation's
"who writes Linux" report are three separable issues.

You could be using gmail.com for patch submission, use your kernel.org
address for git author fields, while working for nokia.com.  And
that's just fine.

Cheers,

						- Ted