Copyright and license policy — Invenio 3.4.0a8 documentation

# Copyright and license policy

## License

All released source code should by default be licensed under MIT License. Exceptions may be made to this policy on a case-by-case basis. Reasons for exceptions could be (but not limited to):

- Source code already released under another permissive license (e.g. Apache v2, BSD) or LGPL.

In all cases, source code should not be released under a copyleft license like GPL or AGPL.

## Tracking copyright

Copyright statements

Copyright statements must be included in:

- `LICENSE` file in the root of the repository.

- Headers of all source code files.

Each copyright holder must have their own copyright statement:

    Copyright (C) 2015-2018 CERN
    Copyright (C) 2017 TIND

Copyright holders

Each copyright holder must be a legal entity.

Copyright is tracked for non-trivial contributions (i.e. creative work). By default we consider anything above 15 lines for a non-trivial contribution. Examples for which we do not track copyright is e.g. fixing a typo or tiny bug fixes.

Maintainer responsibility

Maintainers are responsible for asking each contributor who is the copyright holder of a given contribution (often, it’s the employer who holds the copyright).

Attribution

Attribution is not tracked via copyright, but via the `AUTHORS` file.

Note

Legal entity: A legal entity can be human (physical persons) or non-human (juridical persons, e.g. corporations). A legal entity has privileges and obligations such as being able to enter into contracts, to sue or be sued. Thus, e.g. CERN is a legal entity but e.g. ATLAS, CMS and Invenio Collaboration are not considered legal entities by the law.

## Explicit agreement

Contribtions only via GitHub

All contributions must be opened via pull requests on GitHub.

This way contributors have agreed to the GitHub Terms of Use, which states:

> “Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms.”

This method avoid introducing either a Contributor License Agreement (CLAs) or a Developer Certificate of Origin.