James Bottomley is trying to make life easier for projects that want to accept contributions using the developer certificate of origin as the contribution agreement, but which are concerned about patent grants.
“The lever that will help to make this move is a simple pledge, which can be published on a corporate website, that allows corporations expecting to make legitimate contributions to patent binding licences under the DCO to do so properly without needing any additional Contributor Licence Agreements. Essentially it would be an explicit statement that when their developers submit code to a project under the DCO using a corporate signoff, they’re acting as agents for the necessary patent and copyright grants, meaning you can always trust a DCO signoff from that corporation.“
