The Apache Software Foundation uses various agreements to accept contributions of software code and documentation from individuals and corporations, and to accept larger grants of existing software products.
These agreements help us achieve our goal of providing reliable and long-lived software products through collaborative, open-source software development. In all cases, contributors retain full rights to use their original contributions for any other purpose outside of Apache, while providing the ASF and its projects the right to distribute and build upon their work.
While small contributions to Apache projects are made under clause 5 of the Apache-2.0 license, all project maintainers of, as well as contributors of any large contributions to, any Apache projects must complete, sign, and submit via email an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA).
The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to the ASF and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software. An individual must have submitted a signed ICLA to the ASF before we give them commit rights to any ASF project.
For a corporation that assigns employees to work on an Apache project, a Corporate CLA (CCLA) is available to cover contributing intellectual property via the corporation that may have been assigned as part of an employment agreement.
Note that a Corporate CLA does not remove the need for every developer to sign their own ICLA as an individual, which covers both contributions the corporation signing the CCLA owns, and those it does not own.
The CCLA legally binds the corporation, so a person with authority to enter into legal contracts on behalf of the corporation must sign it.
The ICLA an individual signs is not tied to any employer they may have, so we recommend that individuals use their personal email addresses in the contact details, rather than their @work addresses.
The ASF publishes your Full name unless you provide an alternative Public name. For example, if your full name is Andrew Bernard Charles Dickens, but you wish to be known as Andrew Dickens, enter the latter as your Public Name.
We do not publish your Residence Address or Country.
If you are submitting an ICLA in response to an invitation from a PMC or podling, be sure to identify the project via the form field "notify project". Also, choose a preferred ID that is not already in use. Apache IDs must start with an alphabetic character and contain at least two additional alphanumeric characters (no special characters). You can check for IDs in use here. You can provide multiple preferred IDs in case your first choice is not available.
When an individual or corporation decides to donate a body of existing software or documentation to one of the Apache projects, they need to execute a formal Software Grant Agreement (SGA) with the ASF. Typically, they do this after negotiating approval with the ASF Incubator or one of the PMCs, since the ASF does not accept software unless there is a viable community available to support it as part of a collaborative project.
You may sign documents by electronic signature or by attaching a graphic signature to the form, and submit them by email. The ASF no longer accepts submissions by postal mail, by fax, or by printing and scanning the document. This is to avoid errors during filing caused by poorly scanned documents.
When submitting by email, please fill in the form with a PDF form filler, then save and attach the PDF file to an email addressed to secretary@apache.org.
Do not copy anyone else on your submission, as the documents contain Personally Identifiable Information that should not be exposed to anyone outside the secretary team.
If you are unclear how to use a form filler, see CLA Frequently Asked Questions
You must send the attachment from the email address you list in the document. Send only one attached document (and optional detached digital signature) per email.
If you prefer to sign electronically, fill in the form, save it locally (e.g. icla.pdf), and sign the file by preparing a detached PGP signature. For example,
gpg --armor --detach-sign icla.pdf
This will create a file named icla.pdf.asc.
Send both the file (icla.pdf) and the signature (icla.pdf.asc) as attachments in the same email to secretary@apache.org. Please send only one complete document (file plus signature) in each email.
Do not submit your public key to Apache. Instead, upload your public key to keyserver.ubuntu.com.
The files you submit should be named
We do not accept zip files or other archives. We do not accept links to files; you must attach the files to the email.
Note that typing your name in the field at the bottom of the document is not signing, regardless of the font that you use.
A valid signature involves one of:
We will not accept unsigned documents.
For answers to frequently asked questions about contribution agreements, consult our CLA Frequently Asked Questions page.
