Make GitLab usable for priority of discovery

Problem to solve

It would be good if GitLab repo history could be used to prove that you had an idea before anyone else.

Intended users

Anyone who wants independently verifiable proof that they knew of some piece of intellectual property on a particular date.

Further details

GitLab could offer the ability to timestamp repo activity to provide independent proof for repo owners that their repo contained particular content on particular dates. If that content is some form of intellectual property, then this would be usable as proof of priority for that piece of IP.

Proposal

Pushing to a GitLab repo (and potentially other activities, like merging a PR) could cause GitLab to create an artefact along the lines of a repo hash plus the current date/time and author details, sign it, and then make it public. Crucially, artefact creation is performed by GitLab using a private key, so is independent of the repo and unforgeable. In case of later dispute, the author could use that signed artefact to demonstrate that the repo existed in that form, on that date, and therefore that they knew the contents then.

Permissions and Security

Creating the artefact would be triggered by certain activities, and would not require permissions beyond those needed to perform those activities.

Documentation

N/A

Testing

There is no overlap with the rest of GitLab, so there is no likely effect on the existing product. But there is a risk that this could be implemented incorrectly, or in a way that allowed for forgery, which would potentially open GitLab to legal and reputational damage. That risk feels unavoidable if you want to offer the proposed benefits to software and other authors, but it means that testing of this functionality would need to be thorough and public.

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Success would be when authors of software or other pieces of IP point to their GitLab repos for proof of date of origin. Acceptance would be when that is generally agreed to be proof.

Links / references

There has been some discussion of this idea on Reddit, in the context of GitHub: Can a GitHub repo be used to prove "priority of discovery" (as in, "scientific priority")?.