iCLA request letter (non-code contributions)

Dear $NAME,

Thank you so much for your non-code contribution to the Hydra Project.

The Hydra Project (http://projecthydra.org), follows certain procedures in order to ensure consistent licensing and legal status of all materials given to the Project. These are the same procedures followed by large open source projects such as the Apache Project. This email is to invite you to sign an Individual Contributor License Agreement (attached here) so that your contribution, and any future contributions you make to the Hydra Project, will be covered by our governance and legal procedures. 

We collect individual Contributor License Agreements (iCLA's) from all contributors to Hydra.  The CLA's are based on Apache's agreements; they give the Hydra Project non-exclusive, royalty free copyright and patent licenses for contributions. They do not transfer intellectual property ownership to the project from the contributor, nor do they otherwise limit what you, the creator, can do with your contributions.  At the time of writing, the Hydra Steering Group has determined that non-code materials contributed to the Project will be made available to others under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. 

The CLA will:

·       help protect the project (and all its users) against copyright infringement lawsuits; with a CLA on file, we will be in a better position to defend against any claims that your contribution to Hydra was not intended to be shared more widely

·       help protect contributors, by ensuring an explicit understanding of the nature of and intent of any contributions to the project. If a contributor or his/her employer hadn't fully considered the rights and implications of including their contributions in the project, the CLA makes the license as clear as possible. 

The iCLA is attached to this email, and also linked to from here:  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+Project+Intellectual+Property+Licensing+and+Ownership.  On the same page of the wiki is a link to a “red line” version of the Apache agreement on which our iCLA is based so that you can see what alterations we have made.

Please return a completed copy of the iCLA, duly signed, to legal@projecthydra.org and keep a copy for your records.