"D. Ben Knoble" [off-list ref] writes:

On Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 4:55 PM Collin Funk [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

"D. Ben Knoble" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Any contributors/users with an interest in law feel like taking a stab
at answering "Is Git's signed-off-by legally useful" ?
https://law.stackexchange.com/q/111158/26698

Having a solid reference answer is usually a good thing, if one exists.

Not sure if it has ever been a topic in court, but it would allow you to
argue that committers signed off to the DCO acknowledging that they have
the ability to contribute the work under an open source license [1]. In
other words, the they have confirmed the work is not owned by their
employers, as is often the case with Software Developers in the US [2].

As Junio points out, this is dependent on the project attaching a DCO
meaning to the sign-off.

Yes, I should have mentioned that, thanks. The DCO meaning is what I see
99% of the time, so my writing assumed it.

quoted

That is why I prefer copyright assignments. I have done many various GNU
projects that I commit to. I feel, at least in GNU's case, that they
force you to consider whether an employer may own your work [3]. If so,
the FSF will request your employer sign your copyright assignment.

Obviously, the assignment process is time consuming and a barrier to
entry for new contributors. For that reason some GNU projects, such as
glibc and binutils, allow you to send patches with "Signed-off-by" to
the DCO if you do not have a copyright assignment nowadays [4].

Less germane to the original question: I'm less familiar with
copyright assignment, but it seems relatively heavyweight here. It
seems ironic to me that GNU would want me to give up my own rights
when contributing to their project ;)

I think this section from an article written by the FSF addresses your
concern [1]:

    Some developers worry that assigning copyright will strip them of
    all their rights to the code they've created. To address this, the
    FSF includes a "license grantback" to the developer in the agreement
    contract. For the developer, a license grantback means they can
    continue to modify and share their code, and technically, they could
    even distribute their software under a different license. In other
    words, by assigning copyright to the FSF, the developer does not
    give up any of these sorts of rights.

All of my assignments have a grantback clause. So you could use
changes/improvements you make to a program elsewhere under a different
license.

Collin

[1] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2022/fall/copyright-assignment-with-the-fsf