Our configuration for this is configured in .coafile here: https://github.com/opendaylight/docs/blob/master/.coafile#L6-L12

and configuration options for this linter is available here:
https://github.com/coala/bear-docs/blob/master/docs/GitCommitBear.rst

Our current configuration has it as

Summary message (first line): 50 characters
Commit messages (lines after first line: 72 characters

This follows git commit message best practices as tools that parse git shortlog typically only read up to 50 characters of the first line thus if you have longer commit messages they will be truncated by most git shortlog tools anyway. We typically recommend our developers follow commit message standards as described by here:

https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/

While I'm fine with changing this I do personally think following best practices especially so that parser tools properly parse our commit messages are a good idea. The first line of a commit message is supposed to be a subject line that's short and to the point with any description following it on later lines which do allow 72 character limits.

Discussed on the docs call we will keep the linter for commit message as is.