Re: [RFD] Explicitly documenting patch submission

Linus Torvalds
2004-05-25T17:16:30Z

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Ben Collins wrote:
>
> I've got a question about this. A lot of times I get patches that are
> just one/two-liners and the explanation is somewhat self-explantory,
> etc. Say the patch comes to me from some patch collection maintainer,
> who got it from the original author.
>
> So the original person never put a Signed-off-by, and neither did the
> person who sent me the patch, should I still add the eplicit
> Signed-off-by's to the patch, and add myself, before sending it to you?

You should never sign off for somebody else.

You _can_ sign off as yourself, and just add a note of "From xxxx". That's
what the (b) case is all about (ie "to the best of my knowledge it's
already under a open-source license").

Of course, if it's a _big_ work with lots of original content, and you're
unsure of exactly what the original author wanted to do with this, you
obviously should _not_ sign off on it. But you knew that.

Linus