Contributions to Projects: DCO and CLAs

• Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO)
• Contributor License Agreements (CLAs)
• Other Approaches

Overview

Many discussions of open source licensing focus on the rights that are granted to recipients of the code who are downstream from the project. In other words, if a project is distributed under the “MIT license,” then that is the license that users and redistributors of the code receive from the project.

The project’s license is sometimes called the outbound license for the project. From the perspective of the project community, this is the license under which the project code is distributed outward.

There is a second piece to the puzzle: How are rights in the project code contributed to the project? Put another way, what is the inbound license that applies to contributions to the project, and what mechanisms are used in connection with those license grants?

Before contributing to a project, it is important to understand its inbound license(s) and contribution mechanisms. And, even if you are not contributing to a project, you may still want to understand how it handles its inbound contribution processes.

The two most common approaches used by LF-hosted open source projects are the Developer Certificate of Origin, or DCO; and contributor license agreements, or CLAs. The following pages discuss each of these approaches, together with their intended purposes and how they are used in practice.

Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO)

Details about the DCO, its purpose, and how it is used, are available here.

Contributor License Agreements (CLAs)

More information about why and how CLAs are used are available here.

Other Approaches

Finally, alternative approaches to receiving contributions from third parties are available here.