Documentation: simplify and clarify DCO contribution example language

torvalds · torvalds · commit d4563201f33a · 2023-02-26T11:25:04.000-08:00
Long long ago, in a more innocent time, Greg wrote the clarification for how the DCO should work and that you couldn't make anonymous contributions, because the sign-off needed to be something we could check back with. It was 2006, and nobody reacted to the wording, the whole Facebook 'real name' controversy was a decade in the future, and nobody even thought about it. And despite the language, we've always accepted nicknames and that language was never meant to be any kind of exclusionary wording. In fact, even when it became a discussion in other adjacent projects, apparently nobody even thought to just clarify the language in the kernel docs, and instead we had projects like the CNCF that had long discussions about it, and wrote their own clarifications [1] of it. Just simplify the wording to the point where it shouldn't be causing unnecessary angst and pain, or scare away people who go by preferred naming. Link: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/659fd32c86dc/dco-guidelines.md [1] Fixes: af45f32 ("We can not allow anonymous contributions to the kernel") Acked-by: Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Acked-by: Michael Dolan <mdolan@linuxfoundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
diff --git a/Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst b/Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst
@@ -407,7 +407,7 @@ then you just add a line saying::
 
 	Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
 
-using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.)
+using a known identity (sorry, no anonymous contributions.)
 This will be done for you automatically if you use ``git commit -s``.
 Reverts should also include "Signed-off-by". ``git revert -s`` does that
 for you.
