CLA vs DCO

A contributory license agreement (CLA) is used to document that you and eBay have the right to (1) submit the work you are submitting, and (2) that you permit the third party project to use your work. For example, when an eBay employee wants to contribute to a Linux Foundation open source project and signs a CLA provided by the Linux Foundation, that CLA documents that the eBay employee has the right to contribute the code and that the Linux Foundation has the right to distribute the contributed code under its license.

There is no single, universal standardized CLA, so if you would like to contribute to a third-party open source project that requires your signature on a CLA, please send a request to eBay’s open source legal counsel for review. Currently, eBay has signed Contributory License Agreements for the following projects, and you do not need to sign an additional CLA to contribute to these projects:

1. Linux Foundation
2. GraphQL
3. ElasticSearch
4. Apache Software Foundation
5. Google
6. Cloud Native Computing Foundation
7. JanusGraph
8. Libra

A Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is not a legal contract like the CLA, but is simply a statement that the contributor has the right to contribute to a project, and that the project has the right to the contributor’s contributions.