Linux DCO

The DCO as our contributor license agreement

Full text

(copied from developercertificate.com)

Developer Certificate of Origin
Version 1.1

Copyright (C) 2004, 2006 The Linux Foundation and its contributors.

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this
license document, but changing it is not allowed.


Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1

By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:

(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
    have the right to submit it under the open source license
    indicated in the file; or

(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
    of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
    license and I have the right under that license to submit that
    work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
    by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
    permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
    in the file; or

(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
    person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
    it.

(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
    are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
    personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
    maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
    this project or the open source license(s) involved.

How to sign the DCO

Signing off on your commits

On a per-commit or per-patch basis, simply add the following trailer in this format at the end of the commit message body. You can also use the --signoff flag on git commit and git send-email commands to speed things up.

Signed-off-by: Your Name <[email protected]>

In most cases, we do not require you to use your legal name when authoring and signing off on commits, but we do not allow any anonymous ID, or a fake name that misrepresents your identity, since we require each contributor to be accountable for their patches, especially on the copyright side of things.

Privately sign off on contributions

For maintainers

Please consult CNCF's DCO guidelines (linked in the related resources section below) regarding the use of "real names", more specifically:

A real name does not require a legal name, nor a birth name, nor any name that appears on an official ID (e.g. a passport). Your real name is the name you convey to people in the community for them to use to identify you as you. The key concern is that your identification is sufficient enough to contact you if an issue were to arise in the future about your contribution.

Currently, we're working on designing the Identity Proofs Toolkit project to help with lightweight identity verification using public profiles (inspired by Keyoxide and Keybase) without the need to require everyone to submit documents via Stripe Identity.

Related resources

• The CNCF meta GitHub issue clarifying the real name policy and their DCO guidelines