========================
Copyright considerations
========================

Lino is Free software
=====================

The members of the Lino Community agree that the result of their work is
published using a :term:`permissive Free Software license` in order to make it
available to everybody and to avoid vendor lock-in.

The :ref:`lsf` is dedicated to work according to these license terms and
does neither prohibit nor support derivative work by non-members under other
licenses.

The :term:`copyright holder` for all source files of the Lino framework is
:doc:`rumma`.  This seems the most reasonable and practical formulation as long
as Rumma & Ko are the community motor. We plan to change the copyright holder
to :doc:`lsf` in the future. As long as there is no legal entity to act as
copyright holder, everybody must trust that Rumma & Ko will manage things
correctly.

.. glossary::

    proprietary software

        Software that is published by its :term:`copyright holder` using a
        license which reserves to the copyright holder the right of sharing
        the software of derivative work.

    Free Software

        Software that is published by its :term:`copyright holder` using a
        license that permits and encourages sharing of the software or
        derivative work.

        Not to mix up with *freeware* (a :term:`proprietary software` work that
        is distributed without fee).

        Free Software licenses can be grouped into two types: *permissive* and
        *protective*.

    permissive Free Software license

        A :term:`Free Software` license which sets minimal requirements about
        how the software or derivative work may be redistributed.

        An example is the `BSD License
        <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses>`__ used by the :term:`Lino framework`.

    protective Free Software license

        A :term:`Free Software` license which requires that redistribution of
        derivative work is licensed under the same license.

        An example is the GNU GPL.



Project ownership
=================

When developing :term:`proprietary software` or :term:`protective Free Software
<protective Free Software license>`, the :term:`copyright holder` is legally
also the "owner" of the idea behind the project.

With permissive Free software, the :term:`copyright holder` has no legal means
of regulating how their work is being used. The permissive license allows to
write and publish derivative work even under a proprietary (non-free) license.
Accordingly any other actor may start at any moment and without asking your
permission to use your software and modify it for their own purpose.

This is why in a :term:`development contract` for :term:`permissive Free
Software license` it makes sense to clearly name both the :term:`project
operator` and the :term:`copyright holder`.

Optionally the :term:`project operator` may register some part of their project
as a trademark.


Source contributions
====================

If you contribute some code to some repository of the Lino project, we ask you
to assign your copyright to :doc:`rumma` because we want to avoid legal
problems in case we want to change the license in the future and because we do
not want to add every individual contributor to every copyright statement.


Contributor License Agreement
=============================

When you contribute a change to Lino, then basically you are the
copyright holder of your work and you agree to publish your work under
the same license as Lino and you ask us to integrate your
contribution.

We did not (yet) formulate and sign any Contributor License Agreement as e.g.
`Django <https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/cla/>`__ does it.  Every
contributor is liable for their work: if one of us would (accidentally) publish
a file with sensitive confidential data or copyrighted content, only that
particular person (or their employer) would be liable.