Dear [contributor], Thank you for your contribution! However, before accepting your contribution, we must clear up some legal issues. In short, in order for us to accept your contribution, you have to license your contribution to us as described in the policy below, We ask you to confirm individually each of the 5 rules of the policy. As you will see, our policy is pretty straight forward, as we do not request copyright assignment, nor signed paper work. Yet, we do keep an electronic trail of all license agreements. So, below each of the 5 points of the policy, we ask that you state your agreement. To simplify your work, we have provided explicit templates between brackets []. In your reply to this message, please keep intact the text of the policy and replace the "[...]" templates with your statements. If, for any reason, you do not fulfill the requirements (not clean-room, not copyright holder, do not agree to some other requirements), you should not fill this form. You should, instead, reply to this message and tell us about the problem. --- Sable-UQAM Contribution Policy 2.0 ================================== This document outlines the policy on contributions to Sable-UQAM projects. In the text below, "Sable-UQAM projects" means the whole software project collection, including SableVM, SableCC, and other software projects managed by the project. In order to accept your contribution, the Sable-UQAM Research Group requires that you confirm the following: 1- You have maintained a "clean-room" status with respect to all work you contribute to Sable-UQAM projects. Explanations: You should not have had access to confidential material under terms and conditions that preclude contributing to the development of Sable-UQAM projects. Having agreed to the Sun community source license (SCSL) or any similar non-disclosure agreement, for example, would be such a situation. [In your reply, you should remove this template and state here: "I have maintained clean-room status."] 2- You ARE the copyright holder of all work you contribute to the project. Explanations: Your university or your employer (if you have one) might be the real copyright holder, if you are paid to do the work or if your university got you to sign a document accepting a school policy that all student programs are the property of the university. You must be the copyright holder on code you contribute. If you wish to contribute code that you have written but for which you are not the sole copyright holder, then arrangements with all the copyright holders must take place before you are allowed to contribute this work. You are not allowed contribute any code for which you are not the copyright holder, even if that code is under a compatible license. If you need to contribute code that depends on a third-party library under compatible license, then you must take arrangement with us first. [In your reply, you should remove this template and state here: "I am the author and the copyright holder of all work I contribute to the project."] 3- You confirm that you license all work you contribute to the project under the terms of the Apache License 2.0, or under the license terms of the module you are contributing to, if different. Explanations: Copyright assignment from a contributor is not asked for. A consequence of this policy is that the contributor remains the copyright holder on the code he himself writes, and can thus license it separately to other parties under any other license. [In your reply, you should remove this template and state here: "I do licence my work under the Apache License 2.0."] 4- You give the Sable-UQAM Research Group the right to make changes and add clarifications to the license terms of your contributed work. Any change will be made with the objective of ensuring that: (a) it is possible to develop proprietary derivative works, and (b) the work qualifies as free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, by providing users the four kinds of freedom outlined at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, and (c) the work qualifies as free software according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) at http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines. Explanations: Free and open source software licenses evolve over time. It is likely that new versions of the Apache License will be written. We ask for your permission to change the license terms so that we do not have to contact you, years from now, to use newer licenses. Yet, for protecting the freedom of you contributed code, we put clear restrictions on the kind of license terms we are allowed to chose. [In your reply, you should remove this template and state here: "I do give this permission."] 5- You agree to these terms for ALL works you contribute to the project. Explanations: If we give you an account in our code repository, these terms apply to all code you add into the repository, whether the code is part of the main source tree of Sable-UQAM projects or just a directory in your sandbox. Of course, if you do not wish to work under these terms, there is no obligation for you to use the repository or to contribute your work. If you have a sandbox in the code repository, you may not add papers, reports, and theses to your sandbox. Mainly, your sandbox is a publicly accessible place, with Apache License 2.0 stuff in it. Please do not put any binaries into the repository. However, technical notes and documents that serve as project documentation must be licensed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0 and put in your sandbox (in source form), so that they can be modified to reflect changes as the project matures. [In your reply, you should remove this template and state here: "I do agree to these terms for all my past, current and future contributions."] --- We do apologize for asking this additional effort from you. Fortunately, this only needs to happen once. Regards, [name]