Liri Contributor License Agreements FAQ
Liri

Liri is asking all past and future contributors to sign a contributor license agreement.

Every contributor of non trivial amounts of code (more than just a line or two) to any of our projects should sign such a document.

If somebody is unable to sign the document, their contribution (whether it be code, or documentation or string translations) may need to be removed from Liri.

This document is not a legal analysis of the CLA. If you want one, please ask your lawyer. Here we only describe the purpose of the CLA.

Why is a signed CLA required?

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

It also allows the contribution to be relicensed under the terms of any license that is approved by the Open Source Initiative, should the need arise in the future.

It would be difficult to ask every single contributor to agree on a license change in the future, in return we guarantee that the code is and will stay Open Source for ever.

The CLA also ensures that once you have provided a contribution, you cannot withdraw permission for its use at a later date. This means that people relying on Liri are confident on the integrity of the project.

The answer is NO.

The CLA is merely a license agreement, not copyright assignment.

You still maintain the full copyright for your contributions, you are only providing us a license to distribute your contributions 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.

Can I submit patches without having signed the CLA?

We don’t verify that every contributor signed a CLA yet, but please submit one anway.

Trivial patches like spelling fixes or missing words in the documentation don’t require an agreement, since anybody could do those.

What about if I do Liri development as part of my job?

If any of your contributions to Liri are created as part of your employment by somebody else, the work might not actually belong to you. It may be owned by your employer. In that case, your employer, or somebody able to represent the company as far as licensing goes, needs to sign the Entity Contributor License Agreement in order for that contribution to be accepted into Liri.

They will need to sign a copy of the agreement for each developer who are able to submit contributions on behalf of the employer.

You should also still sign the Individual Contributor License Agreement in that case. Not all the work you do will necessarily belong to your employer and we still need permission to license your individual contributions.

If you have signed an individual CLA, but not a corporate one, be very careful about submitting contributions you have made.

We cannot accept anything that you do not have the rights to license in the first place and that includes code that belongs to your employer. Similarly, if you are a consultant who may be creating Liri patches as part of a job, make sure you and your employer understand who owns the rights to the code. Only submit things that you are entitled to.

The CLA is a legal declaration by you that you have the right to grant such a license for your contributions. It is up to you to make sure that is true.

Does the CLA exist in languages other than English?

We might at some point have the agreement translated into a few languages other than English. However, those copies will be advisory only. It is the English language version that must be signed and returned to us; only the English version is considered valid.