On Tue, Jul 08, 2025 at 09:10:44AM +0200, Martin Ågren wrote:

quoted

I.e., why are we sure that it is OK for us to loosen this requirement
(without jeopardizing the legal status of contributions). And I think
the answer is along the lines of "the kernel did it, and they checked
with lawyers, so we can piggy-back on that work". But it would be nice
if we could cite that source, and maybe even lift some of their
language.

Looks like the kernel commit here:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d4563201f33a022fc0353033d9dfeb1606a88330

cites CNCF here:

  https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/659fd32c86dc/dco-guidelines.md

I don't know if there's any public discussion or statement from the
Linux Foundation or other legal folks on the kernel's wording.

The commit is "Acked-by: Michael Dolan [off-list ref]",
which seems to be a lawyer at LF, e.g., as per Ted's post elsewhere in
this thread. So that could be seen as some kind of statement.

Yeah, I agree (and didn't know that before; thanks for mentioning). I
think mostly I was just hoping that some of this reasoning and these
pointers would make it into the commit message.

The content of the patch looked OK to me, though I do still like the
CNCF wording a bit better.

-Peff