Licensing and contributions
A Copyright License Agreement is a legal document in which you state you are entitled to contribute the code/documentation/translation to the project you’re contributing to and are willing to have it used in distributions and derivative works. This means that should there be any kind of legal issue in the future as to the origins and ownership of any particular piece of code, then that project has the necessary forms on file from the contributor(s) saying they were permitted to make this contribution.
The CLA also ensures that once you have provided a contribution, you cannot try to withdraw permission for its use at a later date. People and companies can therefore use that software, confident that they will not be asked to stop using pieces of the code at a later date.
The agreements used by the srsRAN Project are standard documents provided by Project Harmony, a community-centered group focused on contributor agreements for free and open source software (FOSS). For more information, see www.harmonyagreements.org.
The srsRAN CLA for Individual contributions can be found here. The srsRAN CLA for Entity contributions can be found here. Download the appropriate CLA, then print, sign and scan the document before sending by email to licensing@srs.io.
The srsRAN Project was created and is maintained by Software Radio Systems (SRS), a private limited company headquartered in Ireland. SRS provides srsRAN under both the open-source AGPLv3 license and commercial licenses. SRS also sells proprietary software products which build upon the srsRAN Project codebase. In this way, we attempt to ensure the ongoing development, evolution and sustainability of the srsRAN Project.
Through the license agreements, we ask you to grant us permission to use your contributions within srsRAN and to continue to provide srsRAN under open-source and commercial licenses and within proprietary products. As we do not ask for copyright assignment, you retain complete ownership of your contributions and have the same rights to use or license those contributions which you would have had without entering into a license agreement.
If you do not own the copyright in the entire work of authorship, you can only contribute the work if the third-party works have been submitted separately by the upsream owner or under the upstream license.
If you have any questions about srsRAN licensing and contributions, please contact us at licensing@srs.io