The alteration sees the addition of a Developer’s Certificate of Origin, with which contributors will be obliged to acknowledge their right to make the contribution under an appropriate open source license.
The DCO is also designed to ensure that appropriate attribution is given to developers of both original contributions and derivative works and will also apply to contributors that receive submissions and pass them up the kernel tree. All contributors will have to acknowledge the DCO before a submission is considered for inclusion in the Linux kernel.
This process improvement makes Linux even stronger, said Torvalds in a statement announcing the change. We’ve always had transparency, peer review, pride and personal responsibility behind our open source development method. With the DCO, we’re trying to document the process. We want to make it simpler to link submitted code to its contributors. It’s like signing your own work.
The change will better enable the Linux community to counter suggestions that Linux contains code copied from other sources, such as SCO Group Inc’s claim that it contains Unix System V code, which is the subject of several court cases.
In order to back up the DCO process, Torvalds’ employer, the non-profit open source promotion group Open Source Development Labs, said it would provide resources to ensure that contributions adhere to the DCO.
The OSDL said it will review the content of contributions to confirm that they have been signed off in accordance with the DCO, and will launch an educational campaign to ensure that developers and users are aware of the DCO and its aims.
