Re: DCO: Was: Re: Contributing to gdb

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi Andrew,

On Tue, Jan 14, 2025 at 04:46:14PM +0000, Andrew Burgess via Gdb wrote:
> Luis Machado <luis.machado@arm.com> writes:
> > DCO's don't seem to come for free, as we need to track each and
> > every one of those contributions so we can refer back to them
> > when/if we ever decide to update/switch licenses or if a legal
> > problem arises.
> 
> I wonder how an attempt to switch licence for GDB would work given we
> statically link against libbfd, which can already include DCO code?

In general you have to think of how to handle that up-front. Using an
"or (at your option) any later version" license already helps.

In the case of the DCO that binutils uses it has the clause "I have
the right ... under the same open source license (unless I am
permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated in the
file".

That would then just needs a clarification that you aren't permitted
to submit under a different license. In general we want contributors
to grant all rights the GPL grants, including the "or any later
version" rights.

For elfutils, and some other projects, we solved that by making the
DCO explicit about granting all rights under all licenses that might
cover the project files (and different files have different, dual,
license terms). So our version of the DCO [1] reads:

    I have the right to submit the contribution under each license
    indicated in, or otherwise designated as being applicable to, the
    file.

Cheers,

Mark

[1] https://sourceware.org/cgit/elfutils/tree/CONTRIBUTING#n25