Canonical contributor licence agreement

At Canonical, we manage a lot of open source projects and we're required to have agreements with everyone who takes part in them. It's the easiest way for you to give us permission to use your contributions. In effect, you're giving us a licence, but you still own the copyright — so you retain the right to modify your code and use it in other projects.

Several upstream projects require all contributors to agree on the rules for inclusion of their code, we encourage Ubuntu members to support those when working with the upstream on contribution of patches back to those projects or direct contributions. For most projects at Canonical, the preferred approach is a wide licence rather than an assignment of ownership, and the agreements are documented below. Other projects take their own view but we typically recommend supporting their preferred approach to contribution and licensing, whatever that might be.