Contributor Licence for Code (Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off)
A DCO-style sign-off. Contributors keep copyright and contribute under the licence of the project. No CLA.
- Version0.1.0
- StatusDraft pending owner and counsel review
- EffectiveOn adoption by the owner through nexus-governance
- Applies tocode-contributor on all networks
- Text hash (sha256)ea09d5a2932e4699…
- JurisdictionProposal: the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein; default forum the courts of Ontario sitting in Toronto; mandatory local law is not excluded.
Reports · the Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI Canada), publisher of record
Draft. Not in force.
This document is a draft. It is not legal advice and it is not in force. It becomes required only when the owner adopts it by a recorded decision in nexus-governance. Until then nothing here blocks anyone’s work.
Why a sign-off and not a CLA
We use a DCO-style sign-off. A contributor licence agreement (CLA) that assigns rights or grants more than the project licence is not justified for our publications and their code. Contributors keep copyright. Inbound licence equals outbound licence.
Developer Certificate of Origin 1.1
By signing, and by adding a Signed-off-by line to each commit, you confirm that: (a) the contribution was created in whole or in part by you and you have the right to submit it under the licence of the project; or (b) it is based on previous work that, to the best of your knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source licence and you have the right to submit it under that licence; or (c) it was provided directly to you by another person who confirmed (a), (b) or (c) and you have not modified it; and (d) you understand that the contribution and your sign-off are public and are maintained indefinitely, including your name and email as in the commit. The DCO text is published by the Linux Foundation under its own terms. Counsel to confirm the exact wording to ship.
Licence
Your contribution is licensed under the licence stated in the project: Apache-2.0 recommended, MIT allowed, AGPL-3.0 only where the project chose it. The project licence appears in the project licence manifest and in CITATION.cff.
Third-party and AI-generated code
You do not submit code you cannot license. You name third-party code and its licence. You disclose AI assistance in the pull request. A named human is accountable for the code.
Security
You report vulnerabilities through the Vulnerability and Responsible Disclosure Policy, not in public issues.
Scope
This sign-off covers code published with a publication or in a project that adopts this licence. It does not change the licence of platform software, which stays as the legal register records it.
Record
Your acceptance is recorded in the acceptance ledger. It is an acceptance record by your signed-in account, not a qualified electronic signature.
Governing law (proposal)
The laws of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein. Counsel to confirm.
Other charters of Reports.
Legal documents.
Maps, data and figures on this site are shown for context and general information. They are not advice, forecasts or warnings; the limits of the information are set out in the Disclaimers and Data Notices.
CC BY 4.0 Free to read. Text and figures: CC BY 4.0. Data: CC0 1.0. Authors keep copyright. Published by GCRI Canada.