Consider retiring CLA in favor of DCO

[TheEvilSkeleton]

As a regular free and open source contributor and someone who is interested in contributing to Jitsi Meet, the only thing that prevents me from contributing to this project is the use of a Contributor's License Agreement (CLA).

CLAs are generally a risk to contributors, and even to the future of any FOSS project, because there have been several cases of large projects abusing them by relicensing the code to a non-free/close-source/proprietary license:

• https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/commit/3cd931ef54407c966fc3a5940a06f0b95a7aadd0
• https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/commit/a92a647b9f17d1bddf5c707490a19482c273eda3
• https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/b145fbcaadf0fa7d0e7040eac641d9aef2a26433
• https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/commit/5851c894963cb2d675f2c0628e2dc782e23e65a9

Furthermore, prominent figures in the FOSS community, such as Red Hat, have openly criticized the use of CLAs within FOSS: https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems

As such, I suggest using the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), as it is a standardized license used by the Linux developers. Certain projects have also switched from CLA to DCO for their FOSS project, such as GitLab and LoopBack.

[saghul]

This is something we are going to need to run by the 8x8 legal team.

[TheEvilSkeleton]

Can you forward it to the legal team? Otherwise, I wouldn't mind contacting them

[saghul]

I can, but won't make any promises, as they are generally busy.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[TheEvilSkeleton]

no