2025-05-20 Replace CLA with DCO for all contributions

The OpenStack community has required contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before submitting code contributions. This process has addressed legal and organizational needs but has long been seen as being cumbersome to the contribution process and imposes administrative overhead.

The OpenStack Technical Committee (TC) requested in 2014 that the Foundation Board of Directors implement the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) as the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for the OpenStack project. The DCO is a simpler, developer-affirmed certification that contributors have the right to submit the code they are contributing. We are pleased that the Foundation board has now found this transition feasible.

The OpenStack Technical Committee approves the transition from a CLA-based contribution model to a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) model. The move aligns us with governance practices in other large open source projects, like the Linux Kernel, and will streamline our contributor experience.

The OpenStack Technical Committee therefore resolves to:

  • Replace the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) with the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) as the core legal framework for contributions to OpenStack projects.

  • Set the transition effective date to July 1, 2025. From that date, all commits to OpenStack repositories must include a valid Signed-off-by line in the commit message as stated in the DCO.

  • Direct the OpenDev Infrastructure team to enforce DCO compliance on the OpenStack code review system, i.e., require a valid DCO sign-off for all new commits.

  • Ensure that the OpenStack Contributor Documentation features the Developer Certificate of Origin and includes clear and practical guidance for contributors on how to sign their commits and what the sign-off represents.

  • Encourage OpenStack project maintainers to update their own contributor documentation to point to the OpenStack Contributor Documentation regarding the DCO. We don’t need to reproduce the DCO within project documentation or the source code. All existing documents referring to the prior CLA have to be modified to remove that information.

  • Clarify that existing contributors will not be required to retroactively sign or re-submit anything. However, all new commits made on or after July 1, 2025 must adhere to the DCO requirements. Changes already uploaded to the code review system need not be modified just to include the Signed-off-by line in the commit message. However, when changes need to be modified for other reasons, the commit message must be amended to include the Signed-off-by line.

This adoption of the DCO will lower the barrier to contribution, reduce administrative burden, and bring OpenStack in line with best practices across the open-source world. It’s a key step towards a more accessible and welcoming OpenStack.