The Tranzakt project wants to be a community project, whereby the community can contribute to code, documentation etc. in recognition of the benefits they receive from the use of this software at no cost. However we do not want the copyright to become fragmented and we need to protect ourselves against the risk of contributions including intellectual property that we do not have the right to use.
Requiring a CLA is a common and well-accepted practice in open source.
The Tranzakt Contributor License Agreement ("CLA") ensures that our projects remain licensed under Free and Open Source licenses such as LGPL.
This page gives a human-friendly summary of our CLA, details on why we require a CLA, and more. You may view the full legal CLA document here.
This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the full agreement. This highlights only some of key terms of the CLA. It has no legal value and you should carefully review all the terms of the actual CLA before agreeing.
- Transfer of copyright: You give the copyright for any contribution you have created yourself to the Tranzakt project
- Confirmation of 3rd party license(s): You confirm that the Transakt project and any users of the project will have license rights to include and use any 3rd party software contained in your contribution as part of the project
- Grant of patent license: If your contribution uses a patent you own, you give the Tranzakt project an unrestricted license in perpetuity to use that patent. You also agree that you have permission to grant this license.
- No Warranty or Support Obligations: By making a contribution, you are not obligating yourself to provide support for the contribution, and you are not taking on any warranty obligations or providing any assurances about how it will perform. Obviously we hope that you will continue to contribute and help provide support for your contributions, but this is optional.
The CLA does not change the terms of the standard LGPL3 open source license used by our software. You are still free to use our projects within your own projects or businesses, republish modified source etc. according to the license.
Agreeing to a CLA explicitly states that you are entitled to provide a contribution, that you cannot withdraw permission to use your contribution at a later date, and that the Transakt project has full permission to use your contribution.
This removes any ambiguities or uncertainties caused by not having a CLA and allows users to confidently use the Tranzakt software. At the same time, the CLA ensures that all contributions to our open source projects are licensed under the project's open source license.
The Tranzakt project is a small open source project without the resources to handle formally signed CLAs.
Nevertheless, it is an absolute pre-requisite for making a contribution of any form that you review and accept the CLA, and by making a contribution you are deemed to have accepted the CLA and to have agreed to be bound by it.