I did not find that yet. Can I read that anywhere?

My understanding is that if the initial patch was not signed off then the maintainer could not sign off his patch, unless he wanted to take on the liability of certifying that the contributor was indeed allowed to contribute the initial patch under whatever license we are talking about here. That sounds like a legal risk I would not be willing to take.

Yes, and that was one of the reasons the maintainer rewrote it (which wasn't a lot of work since it was a tiny patch anyway).

The OP has submitted a link to an email archive further down in the thread.

I see which email thread you mean now. AFAICS OP submitted the patch with a proper sign-off again approximately 6 hours after they were told the sign off was missing. So I don't see how that could have been an issue. The maintainers patch is from more than a week later.

> Yes, and that was one of the reasons the maintainer rewrote it (which wasn't a lot of work since it was a tiny patch anyway).

I don't think a simple rewrite is enough to convincingly solve the described problem. There is a reason "clean room design" exists and considering the maintainer read the original patch first before creating their own there is a good argument that they were at least subconsciously inspired by the original patch and therefore plagiarized. That is how I understand the legal aspects of this, anyway.