.. title:: Licensing Considerations of the Dojo Foundation

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Background
----------

Dojo began life as a project to unify disparate Open Source DHTML development
projects. Since they used several different Open Source licenses, a process was
needed to assure users that Dojo's was friendly for all uses and not encumbered
by opaque intellectual property lineages or IP compatibility concerns.

Software licensing, and Open Source licensing in particular, is nothing short
of a political and legal mine-field. If Dojo is to meet it's goal of reducing
barriers to adoption, it is evident that politically charged licenses are
unacceptable. The `Academic Free License`_ was selected as a workable as it is
relatively liberal, does not require contributing changes back to the project,
and has passed muster with corporate lawyers when used in previous projects.
Other licenses under consideration at the time were the MIT/X-11 license and
the BSD license.

This document distills those early discussion into a set of guiding principles
which can be used as to inform future licensing discussions.

Licensing Goals
---------------

The licensing goals of the Dojo Foundation are straightforward:

- Encourage adoption
- Discourage political contention
- Encourage collaboration and integration with other projects
- Be transparent

Licensing Policies
------------------

The above goals have given rise to the following policies:

- All contributors much sign an `Individual Contributors License Agreement`_ or
  `Corporate Contributors License Agreement`_ as appropriate.
- Commit privileges are only extended when CLAs have been submitted.
- All Dojo Foundation projects must release their code under the terms of the
  `Academic Free License`_ v2.1
- Foundation projects may negotiate to release their code under other
  (parallel) terms so long as they are compatible with the Foundation's
  licensing goals (as stated above) and with the OSI's `Open Source
  Definition`_ . Such dual-licensing agreements must be approved by the
  Foundation's Board of Directors.

.. _`Academic Free License`: http://opensource.org/licenses/afl-2.1.php
.. _`Open Source Definition`: http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php
.. _`Individual Contributors License Agreement`: http://dojotoolkit.org/icla.txt
.. _`Corporate Contributors License Agreement`: http://dojotoolkit.org/ccla.txt

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Licensing Considerations of the Dojo Foundation
===============================================

:Author: Alex Russell
:Version: 0.1
:Copyright: Dojo Foundation, 2005
:Date: 2005/10/19

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