Blog Article:

Switching from CLA to a DCO for Source Code Contributions

Michael Abdou

Customer Success Manager at OpenNebula Systems

Mar 15, 2019

DCO

Since we founded the OpenNebula open-source project more than 10 years ago, we have been following the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) mechanism for software contributions that include new functionality and intellectual contributions to the software. Although CLA has been the industry standard for open source contributions to other projects, it’s largely unpopular with developers.

In order to remove barriers to contribution and allow everyone to contribute, the OpenNebula project has adopted a mechanism known as a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) to manage the contribution process. The DCO is a legally binding statement that asserts that you are the creator of your contribution, and that you wish to allow OpenNebula to use your work.

The text of the DCO is fairly simple and available from developercertificate.org. Acknowledgement of this permission is done by using a sign-off process in Git. The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the patch. More info here:

https://github.com/OpenNebula/one/wiki/Sign-Your-Work

We are looking forward to your valuable contributions!

 

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