Contributor Licensing Agreement

As of June 2022, we are no longer requiring a CLA from developers. Details below.

The Contributor Licensing Agreement is an explicit assignment of rights that must be completed before you submit anything to DW that will be included either on dreamwidth.org or in the DW codebase.

Why do we have a CLA?

The CLA is to make sure that you can't be held responsible for the work in the future, that you retain intellectual property rights to your creation, and that you specifically grant us a permanent license to the intellectual property represented in your submission.

Without a signed agreement on file, we can't accept any code, graphics, writing, documentation, etc, from you to be included in the Dreamwidth code base or on dreamwidth.org, because we won't have the rights to use or distribute your content.

Why did we stop requiring a CLA?

niqaeli: the scenarios it's protecting against were weighed as not being significant compared to the barrier entry for new developers that a CLA presents

mark: also the things CLAs really let a business do (relicense code, sell it, etc) are not things we really care to do, and would probably be hard to prove for the old LJ code anyway, so I think we just decided not to care

denise: Yeah, it was a combination of "tracking this is annoying", "I don't have the capacity right now to do it in a timely fashion", and "fuck it, it's not like we plan on ever doing any of the shit that a CLA would be needed for and there's enough of a question about the ownership of the old LJ code, let's just stop doing the thing we decided to do to cover our asses just in case"

(as shared in #development on the Dreamwidth discord, Oct 11-12, 2022)

How to submit your CLA

Download a copy of the CLA in your preferred format from the dw-cla Github repository.

Print out the last page and sign it. (Save a tree! Only print and send the last page.)

You can send a physical signed copy to Dreamwidth Studios, LLC, PO Box 39608, Baltimore MD, 21212, or a scanned copy (or picture taken) of your signature page to denise@dreamwidth.org.