Contributor License Agreement (Individual)

Not legal advice. This document is adapted from the community-standard Harmony Agreements HA-CLA-I template (individual contributor, "any licence" outbound option). It is provided so the project can offer the code under more than one licence (see dual licensing). Before it is relied on to sell or enforce a commercial licence, it should be reviewed by a qualified lawyer and bound to a real legal identity or entity (see Open point).

This Contributor License Agreement ("Agreement") is between You (the individual who submits a Contribution) and the Project Maintainer of Schroedinger Sync (referred to as "We" / "Us" / "the Maintainer") — the sole copyright holder of the project, publicly identified as KeilerHirsch.

By submitting a Contribution (a pull request, patch, or any other form of code, documentation, or material) to this project, You agree to the terms below.

1. Definitions

• "Contribution" means any original work of authorship — including any modifications or additions to existing work — that You intentionally submit to the project for inclusion in, or documentation of, Schroedinger Sync.
• "Submit" means any form of communication sent to Us or our repositories (e.g. a pull request, a patch, an issue attachment), excluding communication clearly marked "Not a Contribution".

2. Copyright licence — and the right to relicense (the point of this CLA)

You retain ownership of the copyright in Your Contribution. Subject to that, You grant to Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable licence in Your Contribution to:

1. reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute Your Contribution and such derivative works; and
2. sublicense and license Your Contribution — and derivative works of it — under any licence terms, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, and proprietary (closed-source) terms.

Clause 2.2 is what allows the project to be dual-licensed: offered publicly under the GNU AGPLv3, and offered to commercial users under a separate paid commercial licence, without needing to track down and re-ask every past contributor. Without this grant from every contributor, the project could not lawfully be relicensed, and the commercial-licence path would be impossible.

3. Patent licence

You grant to Us and to recipients of software distributed by Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent licence to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer Your Contribution, where such licence applies only to those patent claims licensable by You that are necessarily infringed by Your Contribution alone or by combination of Your Contribution with the project.

If any entity institutes patent litigation against You or any other entity alleging that Your Contribution, or the project to which You contributed, constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licences granted to that entity under this Agreement for that Contribution terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

4. Your representations

You represent that:

• You are legally entitled to grant the above licences.
• Each of Your Contributions is Your original creation.
• If Your employer has rights to intellectual property You create, You have either received permission to make the Contribution on behalf of that employer, or Your employer has waived such rights for Your Contribution.
• Your Contribution does not, to Your knowledge, violate any third party's copyrights, patents, trademarks, or other intellectual-property rights.

5. No obligation; disclaimer

We are not obligated to use Your Contribution. Your Contribution is provided "AS IS", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, to the extent permitted by applicable law. You are not expected to provide support for Your Contribution, except to the extent You desire to do so.

Why this exists

Schroedinger Sync decrypts a DPAPI-protected credential store — the trust bar is high, so the source stays open under the AGPLv3 for everyone to read and run for free. At the same time, the project reserves the ability to offer a separate commercial licence to organisations that want to embed or redistribute the code inside a closed-source or SaaS product (something the AGPLv3's network-copyleft otherwise forbids without releasing their own source).

Dual licensing only works if a single party holds the rights to relicense all of the code. That is why every external contribution requires this CLA: it keeps the relicensing right consolidated, so the commercial path stays open and cannot be splintered by a single un-agreed contribution.

How to sign

Until an automated CLA bot is configured, sign by asserting the Developer-Certificate-of-Origin-style line in every commit of Your pull request, and by stating in the pull-request description:

I have read and agree to the Contributor License Agreement (CLA.md).

Add to each commit message:

Signed-off-by: Your Name <your.email@example.com>
CLA-1.0: I agree to the terms of CLA.md

Pull requests without an agreed CLA will not be merged. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Open point (legal identity)

For enforceability of an actual commercial licence sale, the "Maintainer" party above must eventually be a real legal person or entity, not only the public pseudonym KeilerHirsch. Binding this CLA to that identity/entity — and the public trademark filing — are deliberately deferred steps (they expose real-world identity) and should be done with legal counsel before the first commercial licence is sold. The CLA text itself is valid to start collecting agreement now; only the commercial-sale enforcement depends on that later binding.