Tranquil IT uses various licenses to distribute software and documentation, to accept regular contributions from individuals and corporations, and to accept larger grants of existing software products.
These licenses help us achieve our goal of providing reliable and long-lived software products through collaborative open source software development.
In all cases, contributors retain full rights to use their original contributions for any other purpose outside of WAPT while providing WAPT and its projects the right to distribute and build upon their work.
Contributor License Agreements¶
Tranquil IT desires that all contributors of ideas, code, or documentation to any Tranquil IT projects complete, sign, and submit via email an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA).
The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to Tranquil IT and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time. A signed Individual CLA (ICLA) is required to be on file before an individual is given commit rights to any Tranquil IT project.
For a corporation that has assigned employees to work on a Tranquil IT project, a Corporate CLA (CCLA) is available for contributing intellectual property via the corporation, that may have been assigned as part of an employment agreement.
Note that a Corporate CLA does not remove the need for every developer to sign their own ICLA as an individual, which covers both contributions which are owned and those that are not owned by the corporation signing the CCLA.
Attention
The CCLA legally binds the corporation, so it must be signed by a person with authority to enter into legal contracts on behalf of the corporation.
The ICLA is not tied to any employer you may have, so it is recommended to use one’s personal email address in the contact details, rather than an @work address.
Your Full name will be published unless you provide an alternative Public name. For example if your full name is Andrew Bernard Charles Dickens, but you wish to be known as Andrew Dickens, please enter the latter as your Public name.
The email address and other contact details are not published.
Submitting License Agreements¶
Documents may be submitted by email and signed by hand or by electronic signature. Postal mail hard copy and fax are no longer supported.
When submitting by email, please fill the form with a pdf viewer, then print, sign, scan all pages into a single pdf file, and attach the pdf file to an email to contributors-agreement[at]tranquil[dot]it.
If you prefer to sign electronically, please fill the form, save it locally (e.g. icla.pdf), and sign the file by preparing a detached PGP signature. For example,
gpg --armor --detach-sign icla.pdf
The above will create a file icla.pdf.asc. Send both the file (icla.pdf) and signature (icla.pdf.asc) as attachments in the same email to contributors-agreement[at]tranquil[dot]it. Please send only one document (file plus signature) per email. Please do not submit your public key to Tranquil IT. Instead, please upload your public key to pgpkeys.mit.edu.
Hint
send to contributors-agreement@tranquil.it
The files should be named icla.pdf and icla.pdf.asc for individual agreements; The files should be named ccla.pdf and ccla.pdf.asc for corporate agreements;
Please note that typing your name in the field at the bottom of the document is not signing, regardless of the font that is used. Signing is either writing your signature by hand on a printed copy of the document, or digitally signing via gpg. Unsigned documents will not be accepted.
From wikipedia.com: A signature is a handwritten (and often stylized) depiction of someone’s name or nickname, on documents as a proof of identity and intent.
For answers to frequently asked licensing questions, please consult or post on the Tranquil IT forum located at https://forum.tranquil.it/.