Re: Signed-off-by & the law

From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 17, 2025, 04:18 UTC
Message-ID: <20251017041850.GD786497@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <87tszylem4.fsf@gmail.com>

On Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 02:29:39PM -0700, Collin Funk wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> 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.

That's not the only concern. The reason why I have chosen to never to sign an FSF Copyright Assignment is the following:

  "I hereby indemnify and hold harmless the Foundation, its officers,
  employees, and agents against any and all claims, actions or damages
  (including attorney's reasonable fees)...."

If you ever see the word "indemnify" in a legal document that someone asks you to sign, I strongly suggest that you first talk to a lawyer to understand what this might mean. Speaking for myself, if I were to give the FSF my intellectual output, under NO circumstances would I be willing to risk my assets, my house, etc. on an indemnification guarantee.

In any case, as I mentioned in my comment to Ben's Law Stack Exchange answer, before the DCO was drafted for the Linux Kernel's SubmittingPatches process documentation, it was vetted by lawyers at the Linux Foundation and various LF Member Companies. Those lawyers certainly viewed the DCO as being legally useful.

	  	     	    	  	  - Ted

P.S. The FSF has gotten more flexible over time; when I first got involved with FOSS, the FSF required copyright assignments, and so I didn't contribute to FSF projects. Perhaps because enough people, including large companies, have said "no way, Jose", the FSF will now accept copyright disclimers, or even unlimited perpetual copyright licenses. More recently, they've even said that limited number of code contributions with a DCO might be acceptable[1].

[1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/FSF-copyright-handling