So many open source projects enforce the Signed-off-by line in commit messages without assigning any menaing to it. I am not a laywer, but I believe such line bares no meaning unless otherwise specified (and even then it is questionable, at least).
Requring a magical incantation in commit messages is an artificial obstacle for contributing, especially for beginners. If your project does that, try to figure out if you can drop the requrement. Thanks
@hroncok this is absolutely bad advice. instead, projects should explicitly adopt the DCO, so the sign-off has meaning.
git commit --signoff automatically adds the line anyway.
@ariadne @hroncok I'd argue that the line is stupid and needs to go away. What you need to have is an explicit statement of what policy was signed off by. Because people just add it all the time by default, and don't actually know what the policy is of projects they submit to.
Then you can argue that any surprising policy is void for German contributors since they can't be considered to read them (that's the rule for ToS, and arguably those are ToS).
Worst
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Ever.
@hroncok @ariadne From an individual contributor's pov, a Signed-Off-By: line is a minor annoyance. From the pov of a corporation's legal department, it is necessary if the company's going to use your contribution to an open source product.
Either that, or the company will require you to sign a CLA. Which goes directly against the spirit of free software and is a *real* impediment to developers.
I like to be paid when I write software, and I like to avoid signing anything that restricts my rights or my creative control. When a company is okay using a DCO rather than a CLA to protect itself, I'm *happy*.
And if you have the smallest modicum of interest in community-driven free software and people getting paid writing and maintaining it, you will be happy too, and make it as easy as possible for organizations to use a DCO, and ignore the negligible cost of sign-off lines.
@hroncok the meaning we assigned to those tags is basically that the contributor is passing the ownership of their soul to us
we don't require them, but oddly enough some contributors choose to include them anyway
@hroncok Exactly.
Moreover if a project has automatic check rejecting a commit without it, not pointing out to it's meaning for this very project makes this whole exercise bit pointless.
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