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allowed-third-party-license-policy.md

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CNCF's IP policy is set forth in the CNCF charter, section 11.

CNCF project dependencies that are licensed under Apache-2.0 do not require further license review or approval, since they are under the same license as the CNCF project itself.

The IP policy in the CNCF charter allows the CNCF Governing Board to review and approve other non-Apache-2.0 licenses on an exception basis.

To streamline this process, licenses for some components are allowed as per the CNCF Allowlist License Policy (adopted by the CNCF Governing Board on 2018-05-01).

Components that are not under Apache-2.0, and that do not satisfy the Allowlist License Policy, remain subject to review and exception approval by the Governing Board.

CNCF Allowlist License Policy

A third-party component under a non-Apache 2.0 license is deemed automatically approved by the Governing Board for inclusion in a CNCF codebase as an exception to the CNCF Intellectual Property Policy, if all of the following apply:

  1. It is fully licensable under the approved licenses set forth below under Approved Licenses (including combinations with Apache-2.0); AND

  2. It is stored unmodified in a designated third-party folder; AND

  3. It has indications of substantial use outside CNCF by satisfying one of the following:

    1. the component is part of the applicable programming language’s standard library; or

    2. the component was created on Github at least 12 months ago and has at least 10 stars or 10 forks.

Approved Licenses for Allowlist

To be approved as “allowlisted,” a third-party component must be fully licenseable under one or more of the following licenses, and must meet the other allowlist criteria set forth in the Allowlist License Policy above.

License IDs refer to the SPDX License List at https://spdx.org/licenses, except where a URL is specified below for licenses that are not on the SPDX License List.

  • BSD-2-Clause
  • BSD-2-Clause-FreeBSD
  • BSD-3-Clause
  • MIT
  • ISC
  • Python-2.0
  • PostgreSQL
  • X11
  • Zlib
  • Google patent license for Golang (https://golang.org/PATENTS)

Process for applying for an exception

This outlines the process for applying for an exception to the Intellectual Property policy referenced above.

  • A CNCF project maintainer can file a request for an exception using the issue template.

Exceptions should be filed by the project using the component - the exception applies to how the component is being used.

  • A staff member will review and add to the Licensing Exception Board
  • Staff will work with Legal to create an agenda for the Legal Committee to review and present a recommendation to the Governing Board.
  • A vote is called according to the CNCF Charter.
  • If the vote is approved and the resolution passes, Staff will post in the issue, linking to the PR where this has been approved.
  • If the vote is not approved, the issue will be closed.