[TYPO3-50-general] Contributing to TYPO3 v5 / FLOW3: License Agreement

Robert Lemke robert at typo3.org
Thu Apr 24 12:49:52 CEST 2008


Hi everybody,

during the last months we have discussed among the v5 team members and  
the TYPO3 Association's active members if we should require all  
contributors to sign a Contributors License Agreement. We have a  
looked at a few other Open Source projects and came to the conclusion  
that the TYPO3 project, the developers and the Association can benefit  
a lot from it because it protects everyone involved from possible  
claims and grants a clear situation regarding the intelectual property  
of all contributions.

Together with Karsten I have taken the Apache Contributor License  
Agreement and apllied some cosmetic changes (replace "Foundation" by  
"Association" etc.). You find TYPO3's CLA along with some more  
information on this page:

   http://typo3.org/about/licenses

Daniel will publish some news about it soon which will surely give  
some more background information.

Now I ask everyone who already contributed to the TYPO3 v5 and / or  
FLOW3 project to download a CLA and fax it to the Association. A  
signed CLA is required from now on in order to get commit rights to  
the relevant projects. It is also important that we only accept  
patches and other contributions (documentation etc.) only from people  
who signed the CLA.

For that purpose I have added a flag "has signed CLA" to the typo3.org  
frontend users. This flag will be set by our administration team (Jens- 
Kristian and Gina) for those who fax a signed CLA. The flag is also  
propagated to the Forge user records and will soon be displayed in  
everyone's user details (Sebastian or Martin, can you help me with  
that?).

Although it's only required currently by those who contributed to the  
code, it is of course free to everyone of you to already sign the CLA  
in order to make future contributions easier. Being the biggest  
contributor so far (I mean "big" in terms of commits ...) I am  
convinced that this license is a very good step for us as too, as it  
protects us from possible claims and asserts that the TYPO3 project  
stays free and can't be sued by some company who claims rights on some  
old contributed code.

If you have any questions, just ask them here in this list or ask our  
admin team (info -at- typo3.org).

Thanks a lot for your help!

Robert

-- 
Project Leader TYPO3 5.0 / FLOW3
http://typo3.org/gimmefive
http://flow3.typo3.org/



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