Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) enforcement

[francis-pouatcha]

In Open Source projects, legal code contribution is key, with two main methods: Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) and Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

DCO is simple, involving contributors' sign-off on commits, done by adding --signoff or -s in the commit command, stating the contributor adherence to DCO's guidelines. For example:

git commit -s -m "Description of the commit"

CLA, however, is more complex, as it requires pre-signed agreement with the project, which creates higher barriers for contributors and more administrative work for maintainers.

For Datasafe, we opted for DCO for its ease for both contributors and maintainers.

For an in-depth comparison of CLA and DCO, see this article on opensource.com.