> A DCO doesn't solve the problem that the recipient wants some sort of guarantee that they won't be sued over copyright infringement or trade secret theft over some contribution, while a CLA does.

People can falsely sign a DCO, and people can falsely sign a CLA, and in both cases you don't have any easy way to check that. Either one provides an explicit assertion by the person proposing a change that they claim to have the right to grant a license over that change.

CLAs typically require that an _officer_ sign them.

A DCO could do the same, but it doesn't look like the linked DCO does that, and I expect in general they won't, since otherwise they wouldn't have lower overhead than CLAs.

Nothing stops you, as a person wanting to get your code in, from signing the "individual" CLA and ignoring the fact that you work for a company, either maliciously or because you don't understand or don't know that your company holds copyright over the code you've written.

This happens; it isn't a hypothetical.

You say "smaller open source projects" - it's worth noting that the DCO was devised by the Linux kernel community, and was a direct consequence/response to issues raised in an actual lawsuit, namely SCO v IBM. Most open source projects aren't nearly as big and haven't been subjected to actual lawsuits.