A LICENSE.md

This is no legal advice.

For good or bad, all of the code that we write is subject to the following Intellectual Property rights:

  • Copyright: The right to reproduce, derivate, distribute copies, and use the copyrighted work, and to extend these rights to others.

  • Moral Rights: The right of being attributed as the author of the work, and the right to prevent prejudicial distortions of the work (integrity).

Both concepts can be expanded a little bit more by reading the following documents from the U.S. Copyright Office: 1, 2. It is a very interesting topic.

For the time being, think of these rights as a way for the rights holder to decide on who and what can be done with the protected work. Further, without explicit authorization from the rights holder, you are effectively limited by law from doing anything at all with the work, unless you can cite Fair Use.

If you go and read your employee contract, you'll find that the rights over the work you do for your employer are "assigned" to the employer (transferred from you to them), that you won't exercise your Moral Right of integrity over the work, and (with luck) that they'll respect your Moral Right of being attributed, plus many more clauses that are similar in nature.

There is also a third concept called The Public Domain, which are works to which no Intellectual Property rights apply, either because they expired, but usually, because they were expressly waived by the holder.

Public Domain Logo

Whether the existence of these rights is good or bad I leave it for you to think about, but I'll throw some good articles and books here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

At Tech Start UCalgary we commit to Open Source everything under an Open Source Initiative approved license, but we recommend for source code:

And for documentation:

You can use the following resources to make an informed decision on your project:

We believe the previous licenses are good for the following reasons:

  • They enable anyone to benefit from the software, without discrimination, which aligns well with the club's mission, and the fact that we are not seeking profit, but instead, to foster technology.
  • It allows you or your team, or anyone in the world, to continue growing the project or creating a company out of it in the future.

Should you not wish to opt-out of the Copyright Monopoly by releasing your work into the public domain, remember that the rights are yours and not Tech Start UCalgary. You haven't signed any Copyright Transfer Agreement with us (and you won't) so please use Copyright <year> The <project name>'s contributors, where the license asks for it.

The projects are yours.

And in order to ensure future contributions adhere to your license, make sure to include the following text somewhere visible in your project, for instance at the end of the README.md:

  • All of the code that you submit to our code repository will be licensed under the <license>.
  • By submitting code to our code repository you also certify that you agree to the following Developer Certificate of Origin.

This constitutes a very simple Contributor License Agreement.