Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system [LWN.net]

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 23, 2024 11:22 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system by farnz
Parent article: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Note that many of the people who apply "signed-off-by" lines to commits have little to 0 knowledge of this being related to some "DCO" text that lives somewhere on the Internet. All they know is "Everyone else sticks those lines of text in their commits, so I guess I need to too", or "I didn't put that line of text there and the maintainer shouted at me to, so I'd better from now on".

In most (all?) projects that use "signed-off-by" there no process to explicitely document that new developers certainly are aware that this tag indicates assents to the DCO; and the day-to-day interactions between patch submitters and integrators/maintainers often re-inforce cargo-culting.

Note: If you had that process to establish knowledge of and agreement with some DCO text, the per-commit tag becomes.... redundant!

I'd love to see a court case where a project with the (typical) cargo-culting SOB practices had to argue it showed agreement with DCO.

Remember: DCO and SOB came into life cause Linus just wanted to head off all kinds of calls for much worse bureaucracy in the wake of SCO. He invented this as a sop. IMO (given his previous opinions in those debates) a deliberate "we did something" to shutdown the "we must do something" types. It was designed to be the least intrusive thing that would shut those people up - being meaningful didn't matter (given the context of Linus' prior views).

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Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 23, 2024 11:50 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

In that context, it's also worth noting that none of the bureaucracy being proposed would have helped with the SCO case; in the SCO case, the submitter of the code thought that they had the right to do so, and could have passed any bureaucratic hurdle, because the core of the SCO case was that SCO thought that IBM did not have rights that IBM thought it had.

But, because something bad had happened (the SCO case), people wanted to do something to stop it happening again. And Linus was fending off the "this is something, ergo we must do it, because we must do something to stop a repeat".

However, note that the Google CLA could, instead of giving Google an unrestricted patent and copyright licence, merely require you to assert that you have permission to grant those licences, and require that you license the code to Google under the same terms that the Google-owned project already uses; that it's one-way (and - for example - permits Google to sue you for infringing its patents, while allowing Google to lean on the CLA for permission to use yours) is something that often means that lawyers have to get involved if people outside Google are going to contribute (I'd have to get a lawyer involved with every contribution, for example, so that they're happy that Google can't argue that my contribution gives Google a licence to hardware patents not relevant to my contribution, which would be unnecessary if the grant was scoped down to the licence of the project I contributed to).