Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 9 Nov 2017 11:29:34 -0500 | From | Theodore Ts'o <> | Subject | Re: Legal question: Author, Sign-off, Company Copyright and gmail |
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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
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