[victormy]

I’m also maintaining an open-source project and have spent significant time drafting our CLA, so I completely understand the concerns surrounding them.

While DCO is excellent for tracking provenance, we opted for a CLA primarily to address explicit patent grants and sublicensing rights—areas where a standard DCO often lacks the comprehensive legal coverage that a formal agreement provides.

It’s a common and sustainable practice in the industry to keep the core code open-source while developing enterprise features. Without a solid CLA in place, a project faces massive legal hurdles later on—whether that’s for future commercialization or even the eventual donation of the project to an open-source foundation like the CNCF or Apache Foundation. We're just trying to ensure long-term legal clarity for everyone involved.