> The Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is a statement that a software developer agrees to, saying that the contributor is allowed to make the contribution and that the project has the right to distribute it under its license.
CLA's required by some projects effectively require the contributor to give away all rights to the receiving organization. There are other forms of CLA that do not transfer these rights, but are still agreements (which is what the A stands for) between the contributor and the receiving organization. These might allow the recipient to change the license, or they might not. The DCO is just a statement and does not permit the receiving organization to distribute under incompatible licensing terms.
I'm sure some organization can write a "DCO" which says the exact same thing. Ultimately what matters isn't the title of the document but the content. There are plenty of CLAs that just ask for the bare minimum for the project to be able to function (see ones from any of the organizations I mentioned).
Unfortunately, many CLAs give the company that controls the code the power to take the project proprietary (and they will call this the bare minimum of what they need). It's repeatedly happened, so contributors need to be careful with what they sign. Perhaps for a small bug fix they won't care, but for anything larger, beware.
So, you've never heard of a Developer Certificate of Origin? If it's good enough for Linux, it's good enough for me.