Re: DCO: Was: Re: Contributing to gdb

Mark Wielaard
2025-01-15T11:50:33Z

Hi Eli,

On Tue, Jan 14, 2025 at 06:42:59PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii via Gdb wrote:
> As long as we are only considering good-faith mistakes, not deliberate
> lies about the authorship and copyright rights, the difference between
> CA and DCO is that with the former, one is _required_ to provide a
> disclaimer from the employer (if that is relevant; it isn't always),
> so this aspect is pretty much in the face of the contributor. By
> contrast, with DCOs one is just asked to declare that he/she has the
> rights to contribute the code. So people might, by omission, make the
> mistake of not obtaining the employer's agreement, perhaps because
> they are not aware of these aspects, or forget, or...

One thing we could do to make it easier for people contributing work
for their employer is follow what the Samba does for their DCO [1].

Someone wishing to contribute work under the DCO simply first sends a
copy of the whole DCO from their corporate email address declaring
they have permission to contribute to Samba from their employer under
the indicated licenses to a special "contributing" email address. The
Samba project then keeps a copy of that email as a record that the
submitter has the rights to contribute code.

We could ask the FSF copyright-clerk to do that for us. After the
copyright-clerk receives that declaration people are then fine to
submit Signed-off-by patches from their employers email address.

It doesn't prevent all mistakes, but at least makes clear that if you
contribute on behave of your company you have to check you have the
rights. And the explicit email has the added benefit that we can show
we had a company disclaimer on file.

Cheers,

Mark

[1] https://www.samba.org/samba/devel/copyright-policy.html