Contributor License Agreement

Contributor License Agreement

Substantive contributions to the runtime are accepted only with a signed Contributor License Agreement. The CLA grants Poliglot Inc. the right to relicense contributions, which is what makes the dual-licensed runtime possible. Contributors retain copyright to their work.

Read the CLA

Permission to relicense, granted once.

The runtime is dual-licensed: GPLv3 for community use, with a commercial license available from Poliglot Inc. for parties whose use sits outside the GPL. For us to keep offering both licenses on the same code, every meaningful contributor has to grant Poliglot the right to redistribute their contribution under both licenses. Without that grant, the commercial license eventually becomes legally murky on contributed code.

The CLA handles this in one signature. Once signed, future pull requests against the same identity proceed without re-signing.

Our CLA is modeled on the Apache Individual CLA, the most widely-adopted contributor agreement in open source. We have changed the granting party to Poliglot Inc. and made minor adjustments to fit the dual-license posture.

Substantive contributions.

Trivial fixes (typos, link corrections, formatting, whitespace cleanups, comment-only edits) are accepted with just a DCO sign-off on each commit. No CLA needed.

Anything more substantial (new code, refactors, new tests, documentation that changes meaning) requires a signed CLA from the contributor. Maintainers may ask for a CLA on any contribution at their discretion.

Contributions made on behalf of an employer are also accepted under the Individual CLA, provided the contributor has the employer's permission (covered by Section 4 of the agreement). If your organization needs a separate Corporate CLA executed in its name, write to legal@poliglot.io and we'll arrange one.

In-line on the pull request.

Open a pull request against any Poliglot repository. A bot inspects the PR; if a CLA is required and not yet on file, it comments with a link to the relevant CLA document and a sentence to reply with that records your signature. The PR cannot merge until the signature is recorded.

Signatures are stored in a public repository so the audit trail is durable and inspectable. Once your signature is on file, future PRs from the same identity proceed without re-signing.

The CLA text is at poliglot.io/cla/individual. Read it before signing; the bot links there too.

Plain-English summary. The legal text controls.

You keep

  • Copyright in your contribution.
  • The right to use your contribution however else you want, including in proprietary projects of your own.
  • The right to contribute the same code to other projects under different terms.

You grant Poliglot

  • A perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license, with the right to sublicense, which is what enables the dual-license play.
  • A patent license for any of your patents that read on your contribution.

This summary is informational. The legally binding terms are in the full text at /cla/individual. If they conflict with this summary, the full text controls.

Where to ask.