[OSGeo-Discuss] Alternative to CLA: Developer Certificate of Origin

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

Some food for thought for our projects regarding how to deal with contributions, triggered
by a recent reading:
https://lwn.net/Articles/738048/#Comments

Contributor License Agreement (CLA) tend to be replaced by a Developer Certificate
of Origin (DCO) in a number of projects:
	https://developercertificate.org/

DCO is the mechanism required by the Linux Kernel originally, and by other projects
now, to accept contributions, as DCO requires less bureaucracy than a CLA and is
seen more friendly by open source communities:

CLA tastes more like corporate requirement and can typically require an employee to
see his boss, make him approve the CLA, etc...

An example how a project implemented DCO in their CONTRIBUTING.md :
https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

One thing that was no completely clear to me is how a 
Signed-off-by: John Smith <jsmith at example.com>" in a commit message means that
the contributor agrees to the the DCO terms. But reading the help of git commit for the
-s option that is used to add the Signed-off-by, I see:

       -s, --signoff
           Add Signed-off-by line by the committer at the end of the commit log message.
	    The meaning of a signoff depends on the project, but it typically certifies that
           committer has the rights to submit
           this work under the same license and agrees to a Developer Certificate of Origin
          (see http://developercertificate.org/ for more information).

So this is typically a git-centric mechanism.

Even

-- 
Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
http://www.spatialys.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20171105/40ded285/attachment.html>