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2 <title>Samba Copyright Policy</title>
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5 <h2>Samba Copyright Policy</h2>
8 Samba is a project with distributed copyright ownership, which means
9 we prefer the copyright on parts of Samba to be held by individuals
10 rather than corporations if possible. There are historical legal
11 reasons for this, but one of the best ways to explain it is that it's
12 much easier to work with individuals who have ownership than corporate
13 legal departments if we ever need to make reasonable compromises with
14 people using and working with Samba.
18 We track the ownership of every part of Samba via <a href=
19 "http://git.samba.org/">git</a>, our source code
20 control system, so we know the provenance of every piece of code that
21 is committed to Samba.
25 So if possible, if you're doing Samba changes on behalf of a company
26 who normally owns all the work you do please get them to assign
27 personal copyright ownership of your changes to you as an individual,
28 that makes things very easy for us to work with and avoids bringing
29 corporate legal departments into the picture.
33 If you can't do this we can still accept patches from you owned by
34 your employer under a standard employment contract with corporate
35 copyright ownership. It just requires a simple set-up process first.
39 We use a process very similar to the way things are done in the Linux
40 kernel community, so it should be very easy to get a sign off from
41 your corporate legal department. The only changes we've made are: (a)
43 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html">GPLv3-or-later</a>
44 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html">LGPLv3-or-later</a>
45 licenses, whereas the Linux kernel
46 uses <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html">GPLv2-only</a>,
47 and we (b) don't mandate signing the Samba Developer's Declaration if copyright
48 is held by individuals. (Individuals who wish to sign the Samba Developer's
49 Declaration are welcome to do so if they like.)
53 The process is called signing.
56 <h2>How to sign your work on behalf of your employer</h2>
59 Once you have permission to contribute to Samba from your employer,
60 complete our signing process by completing two steps:
65 <p>Email a copy of the following text from your corporate email
67 "mailto:contributing@samba.org">contributing@samba.org</a>:
73 Samba Developer's Declaration, Version 1.0
75 By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
77 (a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
78 have the right to submit it under the appropriate
79 version of the GNU General Public License; or
81 (b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best of
82 my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source license
83 and I have the right under that license to submit that work with
84 modifications, whether created in whole or in part by me, under
85 the GNU General Public License, in the appropriate version; or
87 (c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
88 person who certified (a) or (b) and I have not modified it.
90 (d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are
91 public and that a record of the contribution (including all
92 metadata and personal information I submit with it, including my
93 sign-off) is maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed
94 consistent with the Samba Team's policies and the requirements of
95 the GNU GPL where they are relevant.
97 (e) I am granting this work to this project under the terms of both the
98 GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License
99 as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of
100 these Licenses, or (at the option of the project) any later version.
102 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
103 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html
109 We will maintain a copy of that email as a record that you have the
110 rights to contribute code to Samba under the required licenses whilst
111 working for the company where the email came from.
117 Whenever sending in a patch, add a line that states:
122 Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
128 using your real name and the company email address you used to send
129 the Samba Developer's Declaration to us (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous
136 That's it ! Such code can then quite happily contain changes that have
137 copyright messages such as :
142 (C) Example Corporation.
148 and can be merged into the Samba codebase in the same way as patches
149 from any other individual. You don't need to send in a copy of the
150 Samba Developer's Declaration for each patch, or inside each
151 patch. Just the sign-off is all that is required once we've received
156 Please note that merely including a sign-off in the commit does not
157 imply assent to the Samba Developer's Declaration, whether
158 you're submitting a patch containing your personal copyrights or those
159 of your employer. As such, we won't be able to accept patches
160 submitted by companies that don't follow *both* steps of this signing
161 process. Individual copyright holders who don't assent to the Samba Developer's
162 Declaration should use other means (such as copyright/license headers in the
163 source files) to indicate their chosen license for contributed code.
167 If you have any questions about signing, please email us at <a href=
168 "mailto:contributing@samba.org">contributing@samba.org</a>.
172 Have fun and happy Samba hacking !
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