Note: DCO is not currently mandatory for contributions, but will be required in the future.
In order to contribute to the project in the future, you will need to agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin. A Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is an affirmation that the developer contributing the proposed changes has the necessary rights to submit those changes. A DCO provides some additional legal protections while being relatively easy to do.
The entire DCO can be summarized as:
- Certify that the submitted code can be submitted under the open source license of the project (e.g. Apache 2.0)
- I understand that what I am contributing is public and will be redistributed indefinitely
When DCO becomes mandatory in the future, contributors will need to agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin. To confirm that you agree, your commit message will need to include a Signed-off-by trailer at the bottom of the commit message.
For example, it might look like the following:
A commit message
Closes gh-345
Signed-off-by: jane marmot <jmarmot@example.org>The Signed-off-by trailer can be added automatically by using the -s or –signoff command line option when specifying your commit message:
git commit -s -mIf you have chosen the Keep my email address private option within GitHub, the Signed-off-by trailer might look something like:
A commit message
Closes gh-345
Signed-off-by: jane marmot <462403+jmarmot@users.noreply.github.com>