DCO: Was: Re: Contributing to gdb

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2025 10:47:03 -0500
> 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: Simon Marchi <simark@simark.ca>
> 
> I understand the risks that somebody might claim they hold the copyright
> when they don't.  I'm not sure how that differs from the contribution
> assignment though.  Someone could sign the copyright assignment contract
> when they don't really own the copyright in the first place.  If a
> company claims ownership of some code contributed by some individual who
> signed a copyright assignment but didn't have the right to contribute
> it, what would we do today?  Wouldn't we have to go and delete that
> code?

Yes, we will have to delete it.

As long as we are only considering good-faith mistakes, not deliberate
lies about the authorship and copyright rights, the difference between
CA and DCO is that with the former, one is _required_ to provide a
disclaimer from the employer (if that is relevant; it isn't always),
so this aspect is pretty much in the face of the contributor.  By
contrast, with DCOs one is just asked to declare that he/she has the
rights to contribute the code.  So people might, by omission, make the
mistake of not obtaining the employer's agreement, perhaps because
they are not aware of these aspects, or forget, or...