RFC: Properly stated origin of code contributions

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

Hi,

GHC's Git history has (mostly) a good track record of having properly
attributed authorship information in the recent past; Some time ago I've
even augmented the .mailmap file to fix-up some of the pre-Git meta-data
which had mangled author/committer meta-data (try 'git shortlog -sn' if
you're curious)

However, I just noticed that

  http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/322810e32cb18d7749e255937437ff2ef99dca3f

landed recently, which did change a significant amount of code, but at
the same time the author looks like a pseudonym to me (and apologies if
I'm wrong).

Other important projects such as Linux or Samba, just to name two
examples, reject contributions w/o a clearly stated origin, and
explicitly reject anonymous/pseudonym contributions (as part of their
"Developer's Certificate of Origin" policy[1] which involves a bit more
than merely stating the real name)

I believe the GHC project should consider setting some reasonable
ground-rules for contributions to be on the safe side in order to avoid
potential copyright (or similiar) issues in the future, as well as
giving confidence to commercial users that precautions are taken to
avoid such issues.

Comments?

Cheers,
  hvr

 [1]: See http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/SubmittingPatches