The DCO is very intentionally *not* a license of any kind. A Contributor License Agreement is a license. The DCO was invented because many contributors were uncomfortable with contributor license agreements for various reasons. All the DCO does is confirm that you have the right to make the contribution, it does not grant any permission from anybody to anybody.
Regards, Daniel J. Hakimi B.S. Philosophy, RPI 2012 B.S. Computer Science, RPI 2012 J.D. Cardozo Law 2015 On Tue, Nov 26, 2024 at 1:29 PM Soren Stoutner <so...@debian.org> wrote: > On Tuesday, November 26, 2024 10:28:18 AM MST Daniel Hakimi wrote: > > The DCO is not technically a license, but it is a legal document that > > usually comes along with a license from the contributor to the project > > (that license usually being the project license). It also serves to > replace > > a Contributor License Agreement, offering only a base level of assurances > > that the contributor has permission to make the contributions. Without a > > DCO, a contribution is legally suspect; it carries no inherent guarantee > > that the contributor wrote the code or owns the code, for all you know > the > > contribution was just copied off stack overflow, or from the > contributor's > > company's private code base. > > > > In practice, although it is not a license, the DCO should be accepted as > is > > for the same reasons license text is accepted; free software does not > > depend on the freedom to modify the DCO, and is in fact better served by > a > > non-modifiable DCO. There is still no real reason why the DCO itself > needs > > to be licensed under free terms, and plenty of reasons why it shouldn't. > > This is a non-issue. > > I agree with the above sentiment, but I would disagree in the way the term > “license” is being defined. > > The GPL is a license granted from the project to users of the project. > > The DCO is a license granted from contributors of code to the project, > which > then becomes part of the license the project grants to users. > > Both are licenses. Above it is stated that the DCO ”serves to replace a > Contributor License Agreement”, but I think it would be more accurate to > say, > “the DCO *is* a Contributor License Agreement”. > > The DCO identifies itself as a "license document”, and it is expressly > stating > how the contributor is licensing his contribution, which is, "under the > open > source license indicated in the file” and then certifies that the person > giving > this license has the appropriate authority to do so. > > In regards to the question raised earlier about if this should appear in > debian/copyright, the DCO itself shouldn’t appear, but the results of any > contributions to the project made under the DCO should. So, for example, > the > "open source license indicated in the file” referenced by the DCO should > be in > debian/copyright. And, any copyright information the contributor listed > in > the file will also be there. > > -- > Soren Stoutner > so...@debian.org
