On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 3:43 PM, W. Trevor King <wk...@tremily.us> wrote: > There's no Signed-off-by on the commits adding the DCO to the Linux > tree ;). The only information I can find claiming copyright and > licensing by one of the DCO authors is at > http://developercertificate.org/. I suppose you could alter the DCO > and claim it's under a different license, but the Linux Foundation > lawers wrote the thing, so I think it's more respectful to take them > at their word or just write your own certificate from scratch.
The license is declared in /usr/src/linux/COPYING. Or, are you suggesting that it is illegal to redistribute the kernel tarball? The tarball is distributed under the GPL unless otherwise stated, and nothing in that file containing the DCO states otherwise. Certainly the tarball contains no license that only allows unmodified redistribution. The fact that the same text is published multiple times isn't an issue. You can publish code under as many incompatible licenses as you wish. Recipients have to follow the license they received it under, and if they received it under more than one then they basically get to choose. Licenses GIVE rights, they don't take them away. Absent a license you wouldn't be able to redistribute a file unmodified or otherwise. In any case, I don't think it is necessary to actually modify the DCO. I don't believe that it requires redistributing commit messages. -- Rich
