All released source code should by default be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Exceptions may be made to this policy on a case-by-case basis.
Copyright statements
Copyright statements must be included in:
LICENSEfile in the root of the repository.- Headers of all source code files.
Each copyright holder must have their own copyright statement:
Copyright © 2015-2019 CERN
Copyright © 2019 Some company
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.
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
CS3 Organization are not considered legal entities by the law.
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.
Contributions 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.