Having to sign the DCO discourages contributions

[tredondo]

Background:

1. I'm a technical writer, and love to contribute to open source projects on GitHub, given its easy to use interface for editing Markdown and submitting a PR.
2. At the same time, I don't have the inclination to fork, clone, edit etc. a project just to fix a typo.
3. Prometheus is the first project I've seen in years that automatically rejects all such contributions because of a thing called DCO (remember, I'm just a technical writer, and I'm unfamiliar with the reasons why this DCO is necessary here, but nowhere else I've been contributing).
4. I'm not the only one whose commits have been rejected for not signing the DCO. https://github.com/prometheus/docs/search?q=dco&type=issues shows 116 issues that have the word "DCO" in them. Just look at the first page of results.

I assume this DCO thing is worth rejecting contributions from the community, but there's got to be a better way.

The PR template is super cryptic for drive-by contributors: "Please sign CNCF's Developer Certificate of Origin". What's CNCF? Developer Certificate of Origin? Yeah, you can Google those, but the whole line made me gloss over it several times, and the vast majority won't take the time to Google these things. Also, this line suggests that the contributor would have to "sign" something like a CLA, which can be done after submitting the commit, and is far more likely to be done than someone forking the repo, clonig, and amending their commit.

Also, the PR template is displayed too late for GitHub users. At that point, the commit was already made. Again, look at the hundreds of issues created by the DCO.

If you want to accept contributions from the community, please try to make it as easy as possible for the community to do so.

[roidelapluie]

Thank you. How could we improve the PR template to make DCO easier to grasp?

DCO is mandated to us by CNCF, it is not a choice of Prometheus itself: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/charter.md#11-ip-policy so we can not remove this requirement, but I am happy to see how we can make it easier.

[tredondo]

I don't think updating the PR template would help contributions via GitHub, because it's displayed too late, after the commit is created.

What would help would be a comment block at the top of each source .md file, advising to sign off the DCO. Something like:

<!--
Please sign off your commits so that we can legally accept your contribution.

You can do this with `git commit -s` or, from the GitHub interface,
by adding the following line to the "extended description" of each commit:

    Signed-off-by: Your Name <youremail@example.com>

There is also a browser extension to do this automatically:
https://github.com/scottrigby/dco-gh-ui
-->

BTW, the This documentation is [open-source](https://github.com/prometheus/docs#contributing-changes). note in the footer of docs pages could be even more helpful by directing the user to the precise Markdown file in the repo. Several notable OSS projects do this.

[hdost]

We've updated the document in prometheus/docs will be making some additional changes in the other repos.