Do you want explicit licensing and publishing permissions for each patch you incorporate into your project? Do you miss the simplicity of Signed-off-by tags you use when developing the Linux kernel and Git? This repository extracts the Developer Certificate of Origin and Signed-off-by documentation from both projects, and presents them in a project-agnostic manner. To incorporate into your own project, 1. Pull the documentation into your project: $ git pull --allow-unrelated-histories git://tremily.us/signed-off-by.git signed-off-by Alternatively, you may pull in one of the other branches listed below, for example: $ git pull --allow-unrelated-histories git://tremily.us/signed-off-by.git contributing-github If you like signing merges, you may want to run: $ git commit --amend --signoff --no-edit 2. Tell your developers by pointing to `Documentation/SubmittingPatches` from your `README` or `CONTRIBUTING` documentation and sending a message to your mailing list. 3. Prosper. Branches ======== To make it easier to merge bits and pieces of this documentation into your project, I've split the contents into several branches: master: This branch, mostly a container for this `README`. signed-off-by: `Documentation/developer-certificate-of-origin` contains the full text of the DCO (verbatim copies only), and `Documentation/SubmittingPatches` (GPLv2-exact) explains how to use the DCO with Signed-off-by tags. copying: The license under which `Documentation/SubmittingPatches` is distributed. Check here to determine if you are allowed to merge `signed-off-by` into your project. contributing: An example `CONTRIBUTING` file in case your license does not allow you to merge `signed-off-by`. The contributing file is released under the very permissive CC0 1.0 unported. contributing-github: A version of the `contributing` branch adapted for GitHub-based projects. license: The text of all the licenses related to this repository. Includes `GPLv2-exact` for `SubmittingPatches`, `CC0-1.0` for `CONTRIBUTING`, and `CC-BY-3.0` for `CC0-1.0`. It also includes the short, human-readable versions of the CC licenses. Borrowed commits ================ For work that started in other projects (e.g. the Linux kernel and Git), I've cherry-picked the relevant commits from the project repositories to preserve commit metadata. For each of these commits, I've attached a note with the commit hash, original commit message, and original commit repository. Fetch the `refs/notes/commits` reference from my public repository if you want these notes: $ git config --add remote.origin.fetch '+refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*' $ git fetch origin If I altered the original patch by removing context, I've added my s-o-b. Otherwise the original patch applied cleanly, and I left my s-o-b off.