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Orkeon Individual Contributor License Agreement

DRAFT — TEMPLATE, NOT YET IN FORCE. This text was written by the maintainer as a starting point and has not been reviewed by counsel. It must be validated by a lawyer before it is used to accept a contribution. Until that validation is recorded here (date and reviewer role, no personal name), the check in .github/workflows/cla.yml documents the intended process; it does not create an agreement anyone has relied on.

Why this exists

Orkeon is published under the MIT licence and is intended to be transferred, in time, to a foundation that will hold it on behalf of its users. That transfer — and any later change of licence a foundation might decide — is only possible if every contribution came with clear rights. Asking for them at the first external contribution costs one file; asking for them after a hundred contributions means finding a hundred people.

This agreement does not take your copyright. You keep it, and you may do anything else you like with your contribution. It gives the project a licence broad enough to distribute, relicense and transfer your contribution together with the rest of Orkeon.

Definitions

  • "You" — the individual accepting this agreement, and the legal entity on whose behalf you contribute if your contribution is made in the course of your employment and your employer holds rights in it.
  • "Contribution" — any original work of authorship (code, tests, documentation, configuration, designs) that you intentionally submit to the Orkeon project for inclusion, by pull request or any other means, excluding anything you clearly mark as "not a contribution".
  • "Project Steward" — the current maintainer of the Orkeon project, and any successor entity to which the maintainer transfers the project's stewardship (for example a foundation). Rights granted below to the Project Steward pass to the successor without any further action from you.

You grant to the Project Steward, and to every recipient of software distributed by the Project Steward, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright licence to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense and distribute your Contribution and such derivative works, under the MIT licence or under any other licence the Project Steward may later adopt for the project as a whole.

2. Patent licence

You grant to the Project Steward, and to every recipient of software distributed by the Project Steward, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated below) patent licence to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import and otherwise transfer the work, where such licence applies only to those patent claims licensable by you that are necessarily infringed by your Contribution alone or by combination of your Contribution with the work to which it was submitted. If any entity institutes patent litigation alleging that your Contribution, or the work it was combined with, constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, the patent licences granted to that entity under this agreement terminate as of the date the litigation is filed.

3. Transfer to a successor

You agree that the Project Steward may assign this agreement, and every right granted under it, to a successor entity that takes over the stewardship of Orkeon, and that such a successor may in turn assign it on the same terms. You will not be asked to sign again for that reason.

4. Your representations

You represent that:

  • you are legally entitled to grant the above licences; if your employer has rights to intellectual property you create, you have received permission to make the Contribution on its behalf, or your employer has waived such rights, or your employer has itself accepted this agreement;
  • each Contribution is your original creation, or you have identified every part of it that is not — with its source and licence — in the Contribution itself (see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md for how the project records such material);
  • your Contribution includes complete details of any third-party licence or other restriction you are aware of that is associated with any part of it.

5. No obligation, no warranty

You are not expected to provide support for your Contribution, except to the extent you wish to. Unless required by applicable law or agreed in writing, you provide your Contribution as is, without warranties or conditions of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement.

The Project Steward is under no obligation to include your Contribution in the project.

6. Notification

You agree to notify the project if you become aware of any facts or circumstances that would make the representations above inaccurate in any respect.

How to accept

Acceptance is recorded per GitHub account, once. On your first pull request a check posts a comment; reply on that pull request with the exact sentence it asks for. The signature is stored on the cla-signatures branch of this repository, in the open, and covers every later contribution from the same account. No email, no form, no personal information beyond the GitHub account that already authored the pull request.

To withdraw a signature, open an issue saying so; contributions already accepted remain licensed as above, since the project has distributed them in reliance on this agreement.

Validation record — to be filled in by the maintainer once counsel has reviewed this text (date, reviewer role, version reviewed). Empty means: not yet validated.

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