Contributing to the DATACHAIN FOUNDATION

Procedures

The DATACHAIN FOUNDATION is now inviting all past and future contributors to sign a Simple Contributor Agreement.

With these forms, contributors formally license their contribution to the DATACHAIN FOUNDATION, under an open source license (the "Initial License"). Currently, we accept contributions under the following initial licenses:

Apache License, Version 2.0

This agreement solves, for the DATACHAIN FOUNDATION, the major issue of relicensing in open source software: Formally, most licenses at most allow for relicensing the software on the same terms as the original license. With the license form, DATACHAIN FOUNDATION receives the permission to relicense the software under a different (open source) license than the initial license - and indeed we distribute DATACHAIN Decentralised Infrastructure under the DATACHAIN Decentralised Infrastructure license, not under one of the initial licenses.

At the same time, contributors remain copyright holders of their contributions - they are not asked to assign the copyright to the DATACHAIN FOUNDATION. They only formally confirm the terms under which they made their contribution available to the DATACHAIN FOUNDATION.

The choice of initial license originates from the advice of our lawyer: the initial licenses should be open source, they should be clear and explicit in what they permit, and they should not only include a copyright grant (in particular to reproduce and prepare derivative works), but also a license grant to all relevant patents that the contributor holds. As most contributors do not hold any patents (at least none relevant for the contribution), the patent grant is likely irrelevant for most contributors.

We accept contributor agreements through an online form.


You can also submit the agreement by postal mail, fax, or by email. Please print a copy of the form, fill out your name, address, and initial license, sign it, and either send via postal mail to:
DATACHAIN FOUNDATION
c/o BRAINCITIES LAB
157 Boulevard Macdonald
75019 Paris - France

or scan or take a photo of the signed form and email it to [email protected].

As the form is designed for future contributions, we ask past contributors to state that their past contributions are also covered under the form; we have one such form for past contributions to DATACHAIN Decentralised Infrastructure.

The Title field needs to be filled out only if you are acting for a legal entity (e.g. president of some company), i.e. you are filling out the form for the entity, not for yourself. If you do, fill in the position that you are holding within that organization.

In order to give DATACHAIN Decentralised Infrastructure developers ready access to the list of forms received, we will publish the names (but not the addresses) of all contributors in the DATACHAIN Decentralised Infrastructure source code repository.

If you have any questions, please mail us [email protected].