Free and Open Source Software

Yes. Sun requires that contributors to all of its Free and open-source projects sign the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) and mail or fax back the completed agreement. A copy of the current version of the SCA can be found at http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/sca.pdf.

Before you first contribute source code or any other materials like documentation, design specs, bug fixes, or graphics any contribution to any Sun-sponsored open-source project such as the OpenJDK Project, Project GlassFish, OpenSolaris, or others, you must first execute an SCA. This is true no matter how large or small your contribution might be.

You may send your signed and completed SCA to Sun by regular postal mail, by fax, or by scanning your completed form and emailing the image. The requirement for a signed document is an unfortunate consequence of copyright law in some jurisdictions.

You should check with the project you intend to contribute where your SCA should be sent.

No. Once you execute an SCA, it is valid for all Sun-sponsored projects. One SCA covers all of your contributions to all of these projects.

In that case, an officer of your company (usually a VP or higher title) must sign the SCA on behalf of the company, indicating his or her title. The company can choose to list the specific individuals authorized to make contributions on the "Full Name" line, or may cover all employees with a blanket SCA by not limiting contributors to an authorized list. If necessary, the company may provide a list of authorized contributors in an attachment. The executive signing the SCA must be the first name on such an attached list, and this executive must sign the attachment as well. It may well be the case that your company already has signed a company-wide SCA with Sun you should check first.

The Free Software Foundation will probably have granted you back an unlimited, sublicensable copyright license to your contribution, and other accepting organizations may also grant back such a license. This kind of grant-back copyright license may allow you in turn to grant to Sun all the rights needed under the SCA. Please be sure that you have such a grant-back copyright license if you have previously assigned copyright, and wish to contribute the same code or material to a Sun-sponsored project.

Because of legal requirements relating to the U.S. Government, Sun has worked with U.S. Government agencies to create a specific SCA which you can download here. The remainder of the SCA process remains the same. If you have any questions regarding the SCA, please contact the ombudsman at sun.com.

You can stop your participation in a project at any time, but you cannot rescind your assignments or grants with respect to prior contributions. This protects the whole community, allowing Sun and downstream users of the code base to rely on it. Sun cannot terminate its responsibilities under the SCA either.

The SCA protects the integrity of a base of code, and in turn it protects the community around that code base: Sun, everyone else in a project's developer community and the project's users.

For Sun-sponsored projects (i.e. projects that require an SCA), Sun acts on the community's behalf as a steward of the code in the event of any legal challenge. This is in keeping with how other code stewards, such as the FSF defend projects. In order to represent a code base against legal challenges, Sun must have copyright ownership of all the code in that project.

Consolidated copyright of code also allows for the possibility of relicensing the whole code base should that become desirable. When starting an open source project, the choice of license is intended to be permanent, but the experience of the past few years is that the ability to relicense a project is a useful tool in meeting challenges to free and open source software (and especially challenges from the proprietary software market), and not having that flexibility may be a drawback. Without aggregated copyright, every single contributor must be contacted and unanimity reached in order to relicense a code base, or parts of the code must be reimplemented. This is true for all but the most permissively-licensed open source projects.

The joint copyright assignment also allows Sun to act as a bridge between different communities using the same code under different licenses. This allows the sharing of code between open source projects which might otherwise not be possible and it allows Sun to license source code to parties who are not yet prepared to work with an open source license.

Most importantly from Sun's perspective, it allows the original donor of the code base (Sun, for Sun-sponsored projects), the ability to offer commercial, binary distributions of the project. Without this ability, it would not be possible for Sun to open its technologies, nor feasible to continue to invest in them as a business.

By executing an SCA, you

• share your copyrights with Sun
• license any patents bearing on your contributions to Sun
• assert that your contributions are original works
• assert that you are legally entitled to grant Sun these rights
• assert that your contributions do not violate anyone else's rights

By accepting an SCA, Sun

• promises that your contributions will remain Free and open-source software (i.e. will be published and will remain available by Sun under a Free or open-source software license).

The SCA has been drafted in such a way as to be legally enforceable in multiple jurisdictions.

Yes, many other open-source communities and projects have Contributor Agreements.

It allows Sun to sponsor the projects to which you want to contribute, while retaining the ability to offer commercial licenses. Without this ability, Sun could not responsibly open source code bases such as OpenJDK or OpenSolaris that represent hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder investment. Moreover, the SCA lets Sun protect community members (both developers and users) from hostile intellectual property litigation should the need arise. The community can have greater confidence that there are no hidden encumbrances with the SCA's assertions, reducing this risk, but not eliminating it.

The contributor agreement also includes an "open source covenant", or a promise that a contribution will remain available from Sun as free and open-source software.

Sun has tried to make the agreement as clear as possible. The latest revision of the SCA has no substantive changes but was written to include plain English terms. If you are in doubt about the SCA, you should seek professional legal advice.

No, the SCA only asks you to share your rights. Unlike some contribution agreements that require you to transfer copyrights to another organization, the SCA does not take away your rights to your contributed intellectual property. When you agree to the SCA, you grant Sun joint ownership in copyright, and a patent license for your contributions. You retain all rights, title, and interest in your contributions and may use them for any purpose you wish. Other than revoking the rights granted to Sun, you still have the freedom to do whatever you want with your code.

Sun may exercise all rights that a copyright holder has, as well as the rights you grant in the SCA to use any patents you have in your contributions. As the SCA provides for joint copyright ownership, you may exercise the same rights as Sun in your contributions.

Moral rights are additional rights of the creators of copyrighted works recognized in some jurisdictions, and intended to protect the relationship between an artist and his or her work. These rights remain in place even after ownership of the work is shared or transferred. Moral rights typically only apply to visual or artistic works, and not to utilitarian works such as software. They may prohibit the alteration or mutilation of a work, may protect the author's right of attribution or anonymous publication, and in general govern the artistic integrity of a creative work. It would be unusual for moral rights to apply to an open-source contribution, but in the event they do and you live in a jurisdiction that recognizes moral rights, when you sign the SCA you agree not to assert them with respect to your contributions.

The rights you have in the aggregated code base are not determined by the SCA. Rather, they're a function of the project's license. Open-source licenses confer a lot of rights to users and developers of software. The benefits you seek are very likely available to you in the licenses of the projects themselves.

The SCA does not include any relicensing terms or obligations in the event of transfer of rights. But because contributors retain all their rights, there is no danger that contributions can be made exclusively proprietary. Contributors retain the ability to make sure their contributed material is always freely available.

It depends on the circumstances. In order to protect the whole community, when you agree to the SCA, Sun gains the right to enforce its copyrights in your contributions. However, copyright ownership is shared, and not transferred: the contributor retains the freedom to make additional arrangements for their contributions as they see fit.

Sun would like to consider itself generous with crediting contributors, and is certainly very grateful for the participation and enthusiasm of community members. However, the SCA does not obligate Sun to offer any particular form of credit or recognition for contributions; such policies are determined by individual projects. You should consult a specific project's governance and license documentation for more information.

The SCA does not give you these assurances. But through the governance processes for each project and community, participants usually have a strong voice in how the code base as a whole evolves. Please consult the governance policies of the projects to which you contribute for specific details on how to participate.

Yes, Sun will make certain that any contributions that are published under any license, are available under an FSF or OSI approved license as well.

There is nothing in the SCA that prohibits you from contributing the same works to other projects remember, you are only asked to share rights, not relinquish them. Contribution policies of other projects to which you might want to contribute may restrict your ability to contribute works you've contributed to a Sun project, or to participate in some roles if you have participated in a Sun project. Please consult their policies for more information.

Sun has a policy prohibiting the negotiation of alternative SCAs or amendments. This protects everyone equally, with the goal that no contributor gets special treatment to the detriment of other participants. If the terms of the SCA are not acceptable to you or your company, we can discuss an alternative commercial arrangement.

We welcome community comments and feedback. Please send your thoughts and feedback through email to us.

Sun no longer accepts previous versions of the SCA - please use version 1.5, but in the interests of transparency, we are making the previous versions available for review: 1.3, 1.4. If you have concerns about previous versions, please contact the Sun open source ombudsman.

Many community members have asked us if it's OK to use Sun's Contributor Agreement as the basis for their own. We believe we've created a best-practice document here and we are delighted for others to use it for their own open source projects. We have thus made that clear by applying a Creative Commons attribution-share alike license to the copyright of the Sun Contributor Agreement. We would be very interested to hear from you about your views and experiences using the document and would welcome a note to say you are using it.