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Manlio Morini edited this page May 30, 2024 · 3 revisions

Contributor License Agreement

We look forward to your patches. Before we can accept them, you must sign a Contributor License Agreement. This a one-time requirement for this project. You can read more about Contribution License Agreements on Wikipedia.

However, you don't have to do this up-front. You can simply clone, fork and submit your pull-request as usual. We will be asking to sign CLA before merging pull requests.

Signing the CLA might sound scary but it's actually very simple and can be done in a few minutes.

Why is a signed CLA required?

The license agreement is a legal document in which you state you are entitled to contribute the code /documentation / translation and are willing to have it used in distributions and derivative works.

We wish for Ultra to be used and distributed as widely as possible and in order to do this with confidence, we need to be sure about the origins and continuing existence of the code.

Am I giving away the copyright to my contributions?

No. This is a pure license agreement, not a copyright assignment. You still maintain the full copyright for your contributions. You are only providing a license to distribute your code without further restrictions.

Can I withdraw permission to use my contributions at a later date?

No. This is one of the reasons we require a CLA. No individual contributor can hold such a threat over the entire community of users. Once you make a contribution, you are saying we can use that piece of code forever.

People and companies can therefore use Ultra, confident that they will not be asked to stop using pieces of the code at a later date.

Can I submit patches without having signed the CLA?

Trivial patches like spelling fixes or missing words in the documentation won't require an agreement, since anybody could do those. However, almost anything will require a CLA.

What about your CLA?

It's a copy of the one used by Microsoft for all contributions to their projects. Jurisdiction has been changed from State of Washington to Italy.

So where do I sign? What's next?

  1. Download a copy of the Contributor License Agreement.
  2. Complete and sign the CLA in a PDF editor; or print, sign and scan it.
  3. Email the CLA to claATultraevolutionDOTorg