DCO: Was: Re: Contributing to gdb

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:49:34 +0000
> Cc: Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com>, GDB Development <gdb@sourceware.org>,
>  Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Pedro Alves <pedro@palves.net>,
>  Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>
> From: Luis Machado <luis.machado@arm.com>
> 
> Also, I've seen DCO's being sold partially as a mechanism that doesn't require
> contributors to share personal information, due to privacy concerns. I don't
> think that is true from my reading of it, given we absolutely need to know
> how to reach out to the contributor/employer of the contributor in case the
> need arises. And that is not even considering things like the contributor
> passing away, disappearing etc.

The CA mechanism also has provision for keeping some details
(including even the actual name of the contributor) private, not
exposed in the assignments DB.  You can see some of that in the DB
right now: some people have their names withheld.

So this is not an argument in favor of DCO.

> Has this ever been discussed at a higher level across global maintainers of the
> other projects?

Yes.  There was a big discussion on libs-alpha:

  https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2021-June/127581.html

and on the Gnulib list:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2021-06/msg00079.html

and an almost-simultaneous discussion of gnu-prog-discuss:

  https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/private/gnu-prog-discuss/2021q2/016757.html

Some people made really good points there.  For example, check out
these messages from Paul Smith (the GNU Make maintainer):

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2021-06/msg00085.html
  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2021-06/msg00095.html