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Funding Qubes OS

Funding Qubes OS

Posted Dec 5, 2016 1:42 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
Parent article: Funding Qubes OS

Signed-off-by... It needs to die. At best it's just a meaningless bit of noise on commit messages, adding bureaucracy and friction. In some cases though, this inexplicit "many things to different people" pseudo-legalism, actively harms by muddying the waters of what people think is understood between them.

SOB was invented by Linus purely to solve a *social* problem. Namely, that there were people clamouring for all kinds of complicated legal bureaucracy in the earlier days of the SCO lawsuit, and Linus wanted to put a sock in them, and end that debate. It was a sop, a minimal bit of bureaucracy, very indirectly (and not at all generally obviously) referring to a bit of text stating anyone using it was attesting that "they were the author, or maybe not but thought they knew the author (though need not say who), or maybe not but they thought it was all kosher anyway". It was legalesey enough to stop those advocating for contributor agreements and background checks from arguing much more.

The damn thing unfortunately has been cargo-culted to lots of other projects, despite being even less meaningful than the "CE" conformity mark, AFAICT from how actual lawyers view it. Worse, whatever meaning it could have is often undermined. I have seen:

- Integrators knock back patches for lack of a SOB, and request the patch be resent with a SOB line - without any further explanation to the submitters (who likely must be unaware of its significance) that doing so is expected to indicate the submitter is asserting something.

- Integrators add SOB lines for _other_ contributors, on patches where the contributor did not give a SOB.

- Members of projects advocating for the need for SOB lines, but not actually being aware that there was a separate "Developer Certificate of Origin" text elsewhere that /some/ might view the SOB as attesting to.

- The documentation in 'git' (e.g. 'man git commit') for the SOB flag, did not even mention the DCO for a _long_ time. It was updated the other year I think, after I raised this problem.

This wart isn't just useless, it's harmful. Let it die...


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