All contributions to GitLab are subject to the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), or the Corporate or Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA), depending on where you're contributing and on whose behalf.
Learn more about our commitment to open source stewardship.
Due to restrictions in third-party AI vendor agreements, we cannot accept AI-generated contributions at this time.
By contributing to GitLab, you are deemed to have accepted the agreement (DCO, or Corporate or Individual CLA) applicable to your contribution.
To enter into an overarching Corporate CLA that covers all contributions made on behalf of a corporate contributor, reach out to [email protected].
A record of contributions to GitLab and their respective contributors is maintained indefinitely in the Git commit history, in recognition of our commitment to contributor recognition.
However, in line with the practice of many other open source software projects, and The Linux Foundation’s guidance, GitLab asks that contributor copyright notices are not added to contributions. To date there are approximately 3611 unique contributors to the GitLab project - maintaining copyright notices for all these contributors places a significant burden on maintainers and downstream distributors for little tangible benefit, and in almost all countries a copyright notice is not required for a contributor to retain ownership of their contribution.
Yes. You retain all rights in, and remain the owner of, your contributions. By accepting the terms of the GitLab CLA or DCO, you are granting GitLab broad permissions to use your contribution, but doing so does not undermine your right to use your contributions for any other purpose.
No. The permissions you grant to GitLab are perpetual and cannot be withdrawn.
The Individual CLA is used when a contribution is made by an individual person, on their own behalf. The Corporate CLA is used when a contribution is made on behalf of an organization. If you are in doubt of which CLA is appropriate for a contribution, we recommend discussing this with your employer.
During preparation of a Corporate CLA, GitLab will create a group for the organization on gitlab.com under https://gitlab.com/gitlab-corporate-cla. This group will be used to manage authorized contributors on behalf of the organization. A designated number of individuals from the organization will be able to manage members of their group. This group will not be public, and as such will only be visible to members of the group.
The Legal and Corporate Affairs team (behind [email protected]) remain the DRI for this process. They are supported as necessary by the Contributor Success Team.