Thank you for your interest in OpenContracts (the "Project"), maintained by John Scrudato IV (the "Maintainer"). To clarify the intellectual property license granted with Contributions from any person or entity, the Project must have a record of a signed Contributor License Agreement ("CLA") from each Contributor, indicating agreement with the license terms below. This Agreement is for your protection as a Contributor as well as the protection of the Maintainer and the Project's users. It does not change your rights to use your own Contributions for any other purpose.
You accept and agree to the following terms and conditions for Your Contributions (present and future) that You submit to the Project. Except for the license granted herein to the Maintainer and recipients of software distributed by the Project, You reserve all right, title, and interest in and to Your Contributions — this Agreement does not transfer ownership or assign copyright.
Adapted from the Apache Software Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement v2.2, a long-standing, publicly-published CLA that the ASF makes available for reuse. Substantive terms track that text; the differences are the grantee (an individual maintainer rather than a nonprofit foundation), one added relicensing clarification in Section 2, and the signing mechanism in "How to sign" below, which replaces ASF's mail-a-signed-PDF process with an in-PR bot flow.
"You" (or "Your") shall mean the copyright owner or legal entity authorized by the copyright owner that is making this Agreement with the Maintainer. For legal entities, the entity making a Contribution and all other entities that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with that entity are considered to be a single Contributor. For the purposes of this definition, "control" means (i) the power, direct or indirect, to cause the direction or management of such entity, whether by contract or otherwise, (ii) ownership of fifty percent (50%) or more of the outstanding shares, or (iii) beneficial ownership of such entity.
"Contribution" shall mean any original work of authorship, including any modifications or additions to an existing work, that is intentionally submitted by You to the Project for inclusion in, or documentation of, any of the products owned or managed by the Maintainer (the "Work"). For the purposes of this definition, "submitted" means any form of electronic, verbal, or written communication sent to the Maintainer or a designated representative, including but not limited to communication on issue trackers and source code control systems managed by, or on behalf of, the Maintainer for the purpose of discussing and improving the Work — including pull requests on https://github.com/Open-Source-Legal/OpenContracts — but excluding communication that is conspicuously marked or otherwise designated in writing by You as "Not a Contribution."
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to the Maintainer and to recipients of software distributed by the Project a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works, under the Project's current license (MIT) or any future license the Maintainer chooses for the Project — including more permissive or more restrictive licenses — provided such relicensing does not retroactively restrict Your own rights to Your Contributions.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to the Maintainer and to recipients of software distributed by the Project a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by You that are necessarily infringed by Your Contribution(s) alone or by combination of Your Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If any entity institutes patent litigation against You or any other entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that Your Contribution, or the Work to which You have contributed, constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to that entity under this Agreement for that Contribution or Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
You represent that You are legally entitled to grant the above license. If Your employer(s) has rights to intellectual property that You create that includes Your Contributions, You represent that You have received permission to make Contributions on behalf of that employer, that Your employer has waived such rights for Your Contributions to the Project, or that Your employer has executed a separate Corporate CLA with the Maintainer.
You represent that each of Your Contributions is Your original creation (see Section 7 for submissions on behalf of others). You represent that Your Contribution submissions include complete details of any third-party license or other restriction (including, but not limited to, related patents and trademarks) of which You are personally aware and which are associated with any part of Your Contributions.
You are not expected to provide support for Your Contributions, except to the extent You desire to provide support. You may provide support for free, for a fee, or not at all. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, You provide Your Contributions on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Should You wish to submit work that is not Your original creation, You may submit it to the Project separately from any Contribution, identifying the complete details of its source and of any license or other restriction (including, but not limited to, related patents, trademarks, and license agreements) of which You are personally aware, and conspicuously marking the work as "Submitted on behalf of a third-party: [named here]."
You agree to notify the Maintainer of any facts or circumstances of which You become aware that would make the representations in this Agreement inaccurate in any respect.
Signing happens automatically the first time you open a pull request
against this repository: the CLA Assistant bot comments asking you to
reply with the sign phrase it provides. Your signature (GitHub username,
timestamp, and this document's version) is recorded in
signatures/version1/cla.json. You only
need to sign once — the bot recognizes returning contributors
automatically on later pull requests.
Commits authored by maintainer-operated automation accounts (currently
dependabot[bot] and claude, Claude Code's cloud-agent commit identity)
are exempt from signing: copyright in those commits vests in whoever
directed the tool, not in the automation account, so they aren't a third
party asserting authorship.