inbound=outbound: The clear value of the DCO and its derivatives

inbound=outbound: The clear value of the DCO and its derivatives

Posted Apr 3, 2014 18:49 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)
Parent article: The most powerful contributor agreement

James Bottomley and I have many disagreements about Free Software licensing policy. When two policy makers like James and I are agreeing about an important issue, that's usually an indication that the idea is a very good one.

This is one such case. I strongly agree with the point that a thin DCO-style CLA that implements inbound=outbound is all the CLA'ing that a Free Software project needs. (I wrote about this at length in my critique of Project Harm ony and its “next generation”.)

Indeed, the organization I work for, Software Freedom Conservancy) is often asked by its member projects to implement some sort of CLA, and we usually steer them towards the DCO (or slightly modified versions thereof, as needed). I'm very glad the Linux community invented this idea and shared it freely with the world under a CC-By-SA license. This is a huge help to the community!

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Finally, I have commented elsewhere in this thread to note another important point: I have yet to see a situation where there's a bona fide and useful legal certainty that is sought for a Free Software project wherein a CLA is required. In every example I've seen, the bug lies not in the lack of a CLA, but in an inadequate Free Software license. This is precisely why, for example, GPLv3 is a better choice than GPLv2 and the Apache License is a better choice than the ISC license: because in both those cases, the latter license covers important legal issues that the former license doesn't.

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