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Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses

Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses

Posted Sep 1, 2012 8:23 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses by speedster1
Parent article: Open webOS beta release

Let me explain you what's wrong IMHO:

#Include <ianal.h>

Suppose you wrote a nice little kernel driver, an extra feature to the Linux plumbing or whatever and you add a commit comment to your code:

Signed-off-by: First Last <email@example.org>

See http://www.elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin

This basically mean: "yes, I'm allowed to commit those changes to this repository".

WebOS / HP went on and slightly changed clause (d) in order to create its own variant. So if you happen to write:

Open-webOS-DCO-1.0-Signed-off-by: First Last <email@example.org>

you not only declare a certificate or origin, you also grant a specific commercial entity (HP. Not any WebOS non-profit) the right to do whatever it wanted with your code.

I hope this indicates stupidity.


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