[coreboot] Real name policy

[David Hendricks]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 10:46 PM, Alex G. <mr.nuke.me at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 03/14/2018 11:39 PM, David Hendricks wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 12:26 PM, Taiidan at gmx.com <mailto:Taiidan at gmx.com>
>> <Taiidan at gmx.com <mailto:Taiidan at gmx.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     On 03/11/2018 09:42 PM, Tom Li via coreboot wrote:
>>
>>         2. Even if all developers are registered with their IDs
>>
>>     And you actually have to meet them in person for this due to
>>     photoshop existing.
>>
>>     I have always thought it hilarious when a company asks for a scan of
>>     a passport or identification card.
>>
>>
>> There still seems to be some confusion. As Alberto alluded to this isn't
>> about verifying your identity. What matters is protecting coreboot along
>> with its adopters and contributors (including companies who sell
>> coreboot-based products) from legal threats. That is far more valuable than
>> any bug fixes you might have to offer.
>>
>
> Oh come on. Pseudonyms are perfectly acceptable ways of identifying
> oneself for copyright reasons. See what the copyright office has to say:
>

This isn't really relevant and just muddies the waters in this
discussion. Licensing and copyright are separate things, the DCO (
https://developercertificate.org/) addresses the former.


> Unless I'm reading this policy wrong and "legal name" allows pseudonyms.


...in copyright, but even then you need to register the fictitious name
(e.g. a business name) to be sure the pseudonym is used appropriately.
Otherwise how would a court know that a troll who claims ownership of a
work isn't the real copyright holder?

For licensing the person who contributes a patch to an open source project
must have legal authority to do so in the first place and the DCO is an
affirmation of their "due diligence" (some legal term) to do so. Pretty
much the whole SCO thing was about IBM's license to distribute derivative
works of Unix under the GPL - Check out T.mike's slides (12-14 are
particularly relevant) for a nice summary.

Long story short is that in order to protect coreboot there needs to be
some credible way for courts to trace origins of code should a dispute over
copyright or licensing ever come up.
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