Article 3 grants the Foundation a patent license for patents that belongs to a contributor. All the Foundation wants to do is license OpenFOAM under the GPL. Therefore, if a contributor`s contribution to OpenFOAM is covered by a patent that could prevent the use or distribution of OpenFOAM, the Foundation simply wants the contributor to license it to do all the things it needs to do under the GPL to avoid patent infringement. Q. Do I have to sign the FPCA physically? A. No. We require all contributors to digitally accept via the Fedora Account System (FAS). If you also want to sign a physical copy and send it to us, the FPCA explains how to do it, but it is NOT necessary. One way to manage dues rights is through a City Defence Law Agreement (CLA), sometimes referred to as a “contribution agreement.” However, in the open source community, there are some differences of opinion as to whether a CLA should be asked of individual contributors. A CTC can be used to define legal terms, such as the rights and obligations of the contributor, that apply to contributions (usually software) to the open source project. The CTC may require, for example. B, that the contributor issue a copyright license for the contribution to the open source project, to its managers and/or to downstream recipients. Because CLAs are not standardized, contributions to different open source projects may be subject to different or none of the CLAs.

While small informal open source projects may not require CLAs, for example. B for leisure groups that coordinate via a GitHub repository, large projects, often supported by one or more companies, require formal agreements from their contributors. Several well-known open source projects, such as The Apache Software Foundation, Django Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, to name a few, require CLAs. Q. Why did you change the name from ICLA to FPCA? A. The new text is not really a “Convention of City Law” in the traditional sense of the word, as this type of agreement generally involves the attribution of copyright and the abandonment of the rights of a project. The FPCA has one major reason: to ensure that contributions to Fedora have acceptable licensing conditions. We chose a name that does not use “CLA” to avoid confusion and mark it as a clearly specific license. This agreement describes how you allow PKP to use your software contribution. Signing this agreement does not change your rights to use, modify and distribute this software under the terms of the GPL. A CLA can offer several advantages for an open source project with multiple contributors. By explicitly describing the rights and obligations of contributors, the open source project and/or the person in charge, the CLA can protect any project participant from litigation over licensing or ownership of software contributions.

In the case of projects in which contributors include employees of cooperating companies, the CTC can also assure the company`s employers that certain legal protections are in place to reduce the possibility of intellectual property litigation based on their employees` contributions to the project. Note that a CLA can discourage potential contributors: in the event of a major change, contact the contributor after a task. Send by copy of the request-assign.changes file.