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

Sam James <[email protected]> Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:28:29 +0100

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

Ulrich Müller <[email protected]> writes:

>>>>>> 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. :)

Not for new contributors..

>
> 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/

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