RFC: Properly stated origin of code contributions

[Isaac Dupree]

There are good reasons not to require people's "real" name to participate:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F

Simon PJ often advocates to know people's name as part of creating a
friendly community.  There are good things about this.  It also helps
exclude people with less privilege, whom we have few enough of already,
if it is a policy.

I like most things about "Developer's Certificate of Origin", though.

-Isaac

On 10/30/2014 04:13 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:
> 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
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