This document describes what community members are agreeing to by contributing to the project. This preamble does not form a part of any legal terms and conditions, it's just the TL;DR to state that the project requires certain copyright or license grants from you in order to be able to license the work to others. AspirePress may relicense contributions under different licenses, but we won't offer it under a more restrictive license than a Copyleft or Creative Commons license.
"AspirePress" and first-person pronouns ("we", "us") includes the AspirePress organization as well as anyone acting on its behalf or at its direction.
By contributing work product other than source code, including but not limited to creative design or copy writing, you agree to transfer the copyright for all such contributions to AspirePress.
You retain copyright to source code you contribute. By contributing to this project, you grant a non-exclusive, royalty-free, global, irrevocable license to AspirePress, its heirs and assigns, and any members of AspirePress to use, relicense, redistribute, copy, modify, change or otherwise use, for any purpose, any source code or other work product you contribute.
By contributing, you acknowledge that the code or other work product you contribute becomes licensed and relicenseable by AspirePress, and that you may not revoke, rescind, or modify this grant of license at any time or for any reason.
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless AspirePress and any members of AspirePress from any harm, including litigation or copyright enforcement, for code or other work product you commit that you do not own. DO NOT COMMIT ANYTHING YOU DO NOT OWN OR THAT IS COPYRIGHTED BY SOMEONE ELSE!
For libraries that do not use a Copyleft license, AspirePress permits any open source license to be used except for Copyleft licenses. You may include or contribute any open source code not under a Copyleft license. If a library or repository is already licensed under a Copyleft license, you may use or contribute code using a Copyleft license.
We voluntarily limit our right to relicense code you have contributed, but any new license may be no more restrictive than a Copyleft license. You agree that your contribution and grant of license explicitly allows relicensing of a project to which you have contributed. We may also "dual license" any contribution at any time, requiring certain users to use a particular license based on conditions within that license while all others may use the original or new (but similarly restrictive) license. The "dual license" model does not constitute a reduction in rights or freedoms granted users, and any user that wishes to remain on an older version under the original license may do so.
When creating a pull request or committing changes to any AspirePress repository, you certify:
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(a) that your contributions are your own, are original, and do not violate the intellectual property of any other person or entity;
(b) that your contribution is not in violation of any license agreement or contract that you have with any person or entity;
(c) that any of your contributions may be licensed or relicensed under any license deemed appropriate by AspirePress, including but not limited to open source or closed source, including proprietary or custom licenses, and that such license terms neither violate your rights or your copyright to the contributions; and
(d) that any previous contributions shall be deemed subject to the terms of the version in effect on the date and time of the most recent pull request you have submitted or submit in the future.
The terms of this Contribution Agreement may change at any time, and will be published online with our source code repository or on our website at aspirepress.org. Changes are effective immediately for new contributions, and thirty (30) days after posting the new terms for existing contributions. You may opt out of the new terms by contacting any person on the leadership team in writing via email. The latest version of this agreement is indicated in the timestamp below.
The notes in this section do not form a part of the terms and conditions, but may help explain what is generally meant by some of the references.
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Copyright
If for any reason you do not wish to retain copright to any source code you contribute, please contact us about where it may be assignable. You do not have to do this before submitting a pull request. The differing approach between code and non-code is intentional. To explain with an example, non-code contributions of documentation assign the copyright to AspirePress to enable us to license it under a Creative Commons BY-SA-4.0 license, which requires attribution as well as disclosure of any modifications. This allows reuse of the work, but requires that any copies either remain applicable in the same way as the original, or else disclose the differences to help ensure that anyone relying upon copies of the documentation will be made aware of any material changes.
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"Copyleft"
See Thompson Reuters Glossary, Opensource.com, GNU.org. Copyleft licenses may place restrictions on the redistribution of the modified or unmodified work. Examples include the GPL, LGPL, and Creative Commons "Sharealike" licenses. These are sometimes referred to as "viral" licenses.
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"Dual Licensing"
For example, GPL-licensed code is often licensed as "GPL 2.0 or later". Similarly, if we have released code under a license like the MIT license, existing users would still be subject to that license, while new users might be subject to a different one.