The Project uses various agreements to accept regular contributions from individuals and corporations.
These agreements 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 the Project while providing the Manager of the Project the right to distribute and build upon their work within and for the purposes of the Project.
Both individuals and corporate entities can contribute to this project. This is set up similarly to the Apache Contributor Agreements. For more information on this way of working see https://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html.
All contributors of ideas, code, or documentation to this Project must complete, sign, and submit via email an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA).
Contributor licenses for this project are send upon request. Please refer to your TNO contact for more information.
The purpose of this contributor license agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to the Project and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time. A signed ICLA is required to be on file before an individual is given commit rights to the Project.
For a corporation that has assigned employees to work on the 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.
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.