On Mon, 19 Jan 2026, Matt Whitlock wrote:
> On Monday, 19 January 2026 09:13:04 EST, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > The patch is OK. Please re-send it with the "Signed-off-by: Matt Whitlock
> > <[email protected]>" line inserted - this line indicates that you
> > have legal right to send the patch.
>
> I'll never understand the obsession with this one redundant snippet of
> text. It's not as though my hitting Copy+Paste on it changes anything.
> Did I discover this bug? Did I write this one-liner to fix it? As it
> happens, yes and yes, but suppose I didn't: would you then really be
> legally barred from fixing this bug, forever doomed to preserve the
> incorrect behavior in the kernel because someone who didn't have the
> "right" to tell you how to fix it told you how to fix it? Good grief.
I think that this requirement was added after the SCO lawsuit where SCO
made baseless claims that Linux contains code that was copied from Unix.
So, the purpose is to just have a record of who-changed-what, so that it
would be easier to defend in cases like that.
Mikulas
