Committee, Managing GCC Compiler Development (GCC Steering Committee), Approved termination Practices of mandatory transfer of the Fund of the Property Rights to the code. Developers who want to convey changes to the GCC are no longer required to sign CLA-Agreement with the SPO Foundation. From now on, you can only confirm that the developer has the right to transmit code and does not try to assign someone else’s code.
developers who do not want to sign CLA-Agreement with the SPO Fund, is given the opportunity to use the conditions Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), which since 2004 Applied when transferring changes to the Linux kernel. In accordance with the DCO rules, the author tracking is carried out through attaching each change in the “Signed-off-BY: name and email developer”. Attaching this signature to the patch, the developer confirms its authorship over the transmitted code and agrees with its distribution in the project or as part of the code under free license.
If earlier developers have concluded a special agreement, transmitting all property rights to the Code of Code, now such an agreement is signed at will and developer can leave the right to its code. Thus, property rights to the GCC code will now be distributed between the SPO Foundation and the development participants who have not signed the Agreement.
Similar distribution complicates the change in the conditions of distribution of the project, since the license change will require personal consent from each developer who has not transmitted the right to the SPO Fund. At the same time, the refusal to the obligatory transfer of rights to the code makes more attractive participation in the development of GCC workers of large companies, which were previously required to additionally agree on the signing of an agreement in various instances and legal services.
Concentrating in some hands Property Rights Foundation SPO advocated the guarantor of preserving the invariance of the distribution policy of projects only under free licenses and carried out the task of protecting the community from the change in the initially intended course development course (for example, a possible introduction of a double / commercial license or release of closed proprietary products was blocked For a separate agreement with the corode authors). The SPO Foundation could also participate in the permission of court conflicts on the face of developers and solely make decisions on changing licensing conditions (for example, to force the transition to a new version of the GPL license).