Use of DCO

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 02:25:36PM +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> For everyone else: this involved developers being asked, and at
> least verbally affirming, that they have written the patch
> themselves and have the rights required to publish their work under
> the relevant license.
>
> A CLA gets around this by having an explicit Contributor Licensing
> Agreement where developers explicitly grant a license to some entity
> (usually the project's sponsoring entity or a non-profit supporting
> the project).

I don't consider it correct to see a CLA as "getting around" what the
DCO does. The DCO (in typical form) and (typical) CLAs are doing
different, though overlapping, things.

> Both Mozilla and the Kernel, and several other projects, have
> avoided a CLA for a number of reasons - if you're aiming for a
> diverse developer base (as we are in oVirt) this can slow down
> adoption and participation by 3rd parties. For that reason, I would
> not encourage the adoption of a CLA for oVirt. 

Since at this point the only logical explicit inbound licensee entity
for a (conventional) CLA would seem to be Red Hat, I would also note
more strongly that Red Hat refuses to be the named inbound licensee
for a CLA for oVirt. This issue was dealt with at the inception of
oVirt.

- RF