Clarification around the DCO

[Jeremy Allison]

On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 04:19:56PM -0700, James Bottomley via samba-technical wrote:
> On Mon, 2020-10-19 at 11:00 +1300, Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical
> > That is all well and good, but the way this is playing out here is
> > really awful.
> > 
> > It would be one thing if somebody, perhaps you, came to our project
> > politely suggesting 'have you considered the benefits of'...
> > 
> > The process here is just rubbing everyone up the wrong way.
> 
> I understand, so let me try to explain why this all blew up.  The
> origin is a row on another list which is populated by a load of
> lawyers, a lot of whom are also Corporate Counsels.  This other list is
> governed by Chatham House Rules
> 
> https://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/chatham-house-rule
> 
> Which forbids quoting what was said and who said it.  However, I'll try
> to describe what happened without violating this rule.
> 
> For background, a large number of corporations, through their counsels
> (who are mostly on this other list), have requested changes to the DCO
> over the years (a lot of which were trying to prevent patent capture). 
> All of which requests we've rejected on the grounds of not wanting to
> cause DCO fragmentation.  On this other lists, there was a discussion
> of the DCO which lead to the implication that we'd authorized Samba's
> change while refusing all of theirs'. We were forced to deny this
> implication robustly in case the other list members got the wrong idea.
> 
> Our robust denial got back to the SFC who engaged us privately on this
> topic.   What we actually said to the SFC was we'd obviously done
> nothing about the Samba issue in the past and had no plans do do
> anything now; however, if the SFC could help us engage in discussions
> with Samba, it could potentially lead to a a win-win outcome we could
> report back to the other list.  The SFC told us that actually they
> preferred to let the matter drop.  Thus it was rather a surprise to us
> to find Bradley's patch on the Samba list, but we figured that now the
> situation had been broached we may as well try engaging.  All the rest
> you've seen on the samba-technical list.
> 
> If there's no desire here to investigate DCO alignment at this time, we
> can let this aspect simply drop and you can resolve Bradley's patch in
> the way you see fit.

Thanks for the full explaination James. I was aware of some
of this, but not the full context of:

"the implication that we'd authorized Samba's
change while refusing all of theirs".

Everything now makes much more sense :-). I think we now
have a working plan !