Re: RFC: Removing the DCO-1.1 provision in the copyright policy

Ulrich Müller <[email protected]> Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:01:58 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.gentoo.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

>>>>> On Tue, 16 Jun 2026, Michał Górny wrote:

> GLEP 76 has a special provision [1] that permits using kernel DCO intead
> of our GCO:

>> Alternatively, and if it is applicable, committers can certify their
>> commits with the Linux Kernel DCO 1.1 [8]. This shall be indicated by
>> adding (DCO-1.1) at the end of the Signed-off-by line. Using the
>> Gentoo Certificate of Origin is strongly preferred.

> This dates back to 2013.

Typo? The provision was added in 2018 [2].

To provide some context: It was added as the result of a long discussion
in gentoo-project [3] (unfortunately, gregkh's messages aren't visible
in the archive, for whatever reason). The main argument that we need the
DCO 1.1 was:

| It has also been vetted and approved by the legal departments of all
| companies that allow their developers to contribute to open source
| projects.  Again, a very wide range of legal and developer vetting has
| happened.

In other words, developers would have to ask their legal departments
again before they could use the GCO, whereas use of the DCO 1.1 would
have been approved already.

>                           According to a quick grep across default
> branches of all repositories in git.gentoo.org, there is not a single
> commit using this provision.  Therefore I'd like to propose that we
> remove it and require GCO for all commits.

Yes, that nobody ever made use of that provision defeats the argument.
Also, they have had 8 years to ask their legal department. :)

Ulrich

> [1] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html#certificate-of-origin
[2] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/glep.git/commit/?id=40d20d7ed2eeb7e38ffd2038d2130adc551b4798
[3] https://public-inbox.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/[email protected]/
[4] https://github.com/gpg/gnupg/blob/master/doc/DCO
[8] https://developercertificate.org/

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 544 B)