Thincast Contributor License Agreement
About
When making non-trivial contributions (like more than some lines of code or typo fixes) to one of our projects every first time contributor is asked to sign a Contributor License Agreement (short CLA). The CLA is a legal document. Our agreement is based on the project harmony "HA-CLA-I-ANY" agreement version 1.0.
Project Harmony is a group focused on contributor agreements for free and open source software.
Why is a CLA required
With the CLA you state that you are eligible to contribute and are okay with having your contribution used in distributions and derived work.
Besides others the main reasons for requiring the CLA are:
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It protects the project, users and developers from withdrawal of a contribution at a later point in time. This way it can be ensured that they won't be asked to stop using or remove parts of the project in the future.
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The contributors express that they were permitted to make a specific contributions. This allows it to make a clear statement about the origin and ownership of parts of the code.
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It is also a record that the contributions were given willingly and unconditionally.
Sometimes things go bad, and CLAs can be very useful tools in such situations. There are many examples where the lack of explicit handling of contributions was an issues for (long-lived) open source project. And you don't know what the future brings. Maybe a more appropriate license or any other changes that might effect the project. We believe in open source and want to ensure that our projects are long-lived and also available in future.
Am I losing my copyright?
Absolutely not! The CLA is only a license agreement. You are effectively giving us a "license" to use your contribution without further restrictions. But you retain the full copyright of your contribution. That means you still have the full rights to re-use, re-distribute, modify the code and share your contribution with other projects.
Are contributions possible without CLA?
Yes. If the contribution is "trivial". An example would be a spelling fix.
The difference between the individual and the entity CLA
When signing the CLA it's important to understand that you need to have the right to grant the license for your contribution as you legally declare to have it. If you create a contribution as part of a contract or as part of your work, depending on the contract, your employer might own this right. In the latter case, when employer/company you work for owns the right, the CLA needs to be signed by them and grant you the permission to contribute. This is the only difference between the individual and the entity CLA. The individual is for a single person and the entity for a company (legal entity).
How to sign
You can sign the CLA online or offline.
In both cases it is important to note that the email address you enter need to match the one used for the "Author" in your git commit. The only exception is the contact email address in the entity CLA.
If you have any questions please contact cla@thincast.com.
Sign online
- Goto https://thincast.com/cla
- Choose the CLA type
- Read through CLA - below the text you have a download link to the CLA in PDF format as well as the sha256 checksum. If you want to verify that you sign the very same version of the CLA download the document and create the checksum (see below).
- Fill out the form fields
- Agree to the CLA by entering the words "I AGREE"
- Submit your request
The sha256 checksum of the document can be calculated the following way:
- Linux: simply run 'sha256sum' on the command line with the document as parameter
- MacOS: run 'shasum -a 256' on the command line with the document as parameter
- Windows: run 'CertUtil -hashfile FILENAME SHA256' with the document as parameter in a command prompt
Sign offline
- Download and read the corresponding CLA
- Individual Contributor License Agreement - if you are an individual person that wants to contribute
- Entity Contributor License Agreement - if you are a legal entity and one of your employees contributes
- Print the document
- Fill out the form
- Send it to us by: email, fax or mail (you find the addresses in the downloaded document)
