• Software
• Licence

• DRAFT pages - not as yet agreed... please put comments at end, or make better :p

CAcert Software Licence Regime

As with many projects, CAcert has a lot of software. Most of this is licensed under some form of open source regime.

CAcert General Licence Regime (CaGL)

Licences. Software listed under the 'CAcert General Licence Regime' is issued under these licences:

• GPL 2
• GPL 3

At a later date, other licences may be added. Ask.

Software. Source code listed under this regime includes:

• Birdshack

  webdb ??

  SS ??

  Gigi

Publication. Source code falling under this regime should include the following comment or similar at or as close as possible to the first line of the source file:

/** Copyright (c) CAcert Inc and Team.  Published under CGL http://wiki.cacert.org/Software/Licence */

CAcert Special Licence Regime (CaSL)

None as yet - write!

Origin of code - CCA 1.3

Our Community Agreement CCA 1.3 Your Contributions says this:

You agree to a non-exclusive non-restrictive non-revokable transfer of Licence to CAcert for your contributions. That is, if you post an idea or comment on a CAcert forum, or email it to other Members, your work can be used freely by the Community for CAcert purposes, including placing under CAcert's licences for wider publication.

You retain authorship rights, and the rights to also transfer non-exclusive rights to other parties. That is, you can still use your ideas and contributions outside the Community.

Note that the following exceptions override this clause:
  1. Contributions to controlled documents are subject to Policy on Policy ("PoP" => COD1)
  2. Source code is subject to an open source licence regime.

This clause is intended to give CAcert Inc the full ability to package and distribute the source under the licences that it chooses, according to the consensus of the community and developers.

Other References and Inputs

• PolicyDrafts/DocumentLicence for policies

• Original Licence Document for webdb source package

Open Commentary....

please

• in my opinion it would be better to use the proper GPLv2+ or GPLv3+ license statement as described in the GPL text under "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". So every source file should start with a paragraph:

  • /*
     * This file is part of <software>.
     * Copyright (C) <year>  CAcert Inc. and Team
     *
     * <software> is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
     * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
     * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
     * (at your option) any later version.
     *
     * <software> is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
     * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
     * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
     * GNU General Public License for more details.
     *
     * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
     * along with <software>.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
     */

• we also have to bundle a copy of the license text with release tarballs or have them in our version control system

  • JanDittberner

• CategorySoftware