.. SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
   Copyright 2026 The Linux Foundation

Other Approaches
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Virtually all LF projects use the DCO and/or CLAs to receive contributions. However, not all open source projects in the broader ecosystem use these processes.

Assignment Agreements
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Some project communities may require the *assignment* (transfer) of copyright ownership from the contributor to the legal entity that hosts the project. In some cases, the legal entity may simultaneously grant a license back to the contributor for those rights.

Assignment agreements were once more common, but are less common in today's open source projects. Contributors may frequently object to the feeling that they are giving up their ownership in the software that they developed. They can also lead to mistrust in particular where the ownership of copyrights is being transferred to a company which might be able to unilaterally change the overall license in the future.

No explicit contribution mechanism
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Finally, many projects do not use any formal or explicit contribution process at all.

In some cases, and particularly for smaller projects, this is because there is only a single copyright holder to the project (e.g., a single individual or company).

In other cases, the group of contributors simply has not established any sort of formal governance process for contributions. This does not necessarily mean that the project is inherently "risky" to use. A large number of widely-used open source components and dependencies may operate without any such terms in place.

However, in order to increase clarity and mutual cooperation, the LF encourages the use of formal contribution mechanisms wherever possible---especially lightweight processes such as the DCO which can be adopted and implemented with minimal effort.