Project Harmony is an initiative by
Canonical Ltd.
Canonical Ltd. is a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects. Canonical employs staff ...
about contributor agreements for Open Source software. The aim of the Harmony project is to develop templates of
Contributor License Agreements for use by
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
(FOSS) projects.
The Canonical initiative was announced in June 2010 by
Amanda Brock
Amanda is a Latin feminine gerundive (i.e. verbal adjective) name meaning, literally, “she who must (or is fit to) be loved”. Other translations, with similar meaning, could be "deserving to be loved," "worthy of love," or "loved very much b ...
, General Counsel at Canonical. In July 2011, the project released version 1.0 of its agreements templates. Following this release, the project was seen by some as an important step for
intellectual property
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...
and
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
management for open Source software, and by some others as "Making an exception (ie copyright aggregation) the norm".
Contributor agreement options
The project proposes two types of options for the
Contributor License Agreements:
* Copyright License: The contributors retain the copyright to their contribution.
* Copyright Assignment: The contributors transfer the copyright of their contribution to the project.
See also
*
Free and open source software (FOSS)
*
Contributor License Agreement
*
Harmony CLA
References
External links
Project page
Software licenses
Copyright law
Intellectual property activism
Free and open-source software organizations
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