What is a Contributor License Agreement and why are we using it?
The reasons why we're using a contributor license agreement, prominent examples of contributor license agreements being used, and a human readable summary.
A Contributor License Agreement explains the terms under which intellectual property, in any form or manner, is contributed to a company or a project.
As we started getting contributions from various members of the India Investments community, we realized that we needed a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to clarify the ownership details of the contributions being made. We cannot afford to have ambiguities about the ownership of the content being incorporated in our wiki, both for the sake of the contributors, and our wiki itself.
The presence of a CLA eliminates any ambiguities or uncertainties about ownership and allows both users and contributors to confidently use our wiki.
A CLA is often used by software companies or projects but can be used by any kind of project which accepts contributions from a community. Here are some prominent examples of a CLA being used.
This is a human friendly summary of (and not a substitute for) the full CLA linked below. This section 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.
- grant of copyright license - you give India Investments permission and a non-exclusive copyright to use your work in any form or manner. This means that you retain the ownership and copyright over your contributions but we, India Investments, also retain a non-exclusive ownership and copyright over your contribution. Both parties may use the contribution as they see fit without any restrictions or requirements.
- legal entitlement of contributions - you agree that you are legally entitled to grant us a copyright over your contributions
- providing support - you are not expected to provide support for your contributions except to the extent you desire. The support provided shall be free or none at all.
Here's the actual legal CLA.