372d4b42d3
The docs for submitting a patch describe using your "Legal Name" with
the Signed-off-by line.
In recent times, there's been a general push back[1] against the notion
that use of Signed-off-by in a project automatically requires / implies
the use of legal ("real") names and greater awareness of the downsides.
Full discussion of the problems of such policies is beyond the scope of
this commit message, but at a high level they are liable to marginalize,
disadvantage, and potentially result in harm, to contributors.
TL;DR: there are compelling reasons for a person to choose distinct
identities in different contexts & a decision to override that choice
should not be taken lightly.
A number of key projects have responded to the issues raised by making
it clear that a contributor is free to determine the identity used in
SoB lines:
* Linux has clarified[2] that they merely expect use of the
contributor's "known identity", removing the previous explicit
rejection of pseudonyms.
* CNCF has clarified[3] that the real name is simply the identity
the contributor chooses to use in the context of the community
and does not have to be a legal name, nor birth name, nor appear
on any government ID.
Since we have no intention of ever routinely checking any form of ID
documents for contributors[4], realistically we have no way of knowing
anything about the name they are using, except through chance, or
through the contributor volunteering the information. IOW, we almost
certainly already have people using pseudonyms for contributions.
This proposes to accept that reality and eliminate unnecessary friction,
by following Linux & the CNCF in merely asking that a contributors'
commonly known identity, of their choosing, be used with the SoB line.
[1] Raised in many contexts at many times, but a decent overall summary
can be read at https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d4563201f33a022fc0353033d9dfeb1606a88330
[3] https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/659fd32c86dc/dco-guidelines.md
[4] Excluding the rare GPG key signing parties for regular maintainers
Reviewed-by: Peter Krempa <pkrempa@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Libvirt API for virtualization
Libvirt provides a portable, long term stable C API for managing the virtualization technologies provided by many operating systems. It includes support for QEMU, KVM, Xen, LXC, bhyve, Virtuozzo, VMware vCenter and ESX, VMware Desktop, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and the POWER Hypervisor.
For some of these hypervisors, it provides a stateful management daemon which runs on the virtualization host allowing access to the API both by non-privileged local users and remote users.
Layered packages provide bindings of the libvirt C API into other languages including Python, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, OCaml, as well as mappings into object systems such as GObject, CIM and SNMP.
Further information about the libvirt project can be found on the website:
License
The libvirt C API is distributed under the terms of GNU Lesser
General Public License, version 2.1 (or later). Some parts of the code
that are not part of the C library may have the more restrictive GNU
General Public License, version 2.0 (or later). See the files
COPYING.LESSER and COPYING for full license
terms & conditions.
Installation
Instructions on building and installing libvirt can be found on the website:
https://libvirt.org/compiling.html
Contributing
The libvirt project welcomes contributions in many ways. For most components the best way to contribute is to send patches to the primary development mailing list. Further guidance on this can be found on the website:
https://libvirt.org/contribute.html
Contact
The libvirt project has two primary mailing lists:
- users@lists.libvirt.org (for user discussions)
- devel@lists.libvirt.org (for development only)
Further details on contacting the project are available on the website: