New LDraw.org Contributer's Agreement

[Orion Pobursky]

All,

A new Contributor's agreement has been agreed upon by the SteerCo. The text is as follows:

By submitting work ("the Work") to The LDraw Organization ("LDraw.org"), the submitter ("the Author"), agrees to release the Work under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License ("CC BY 4.0").

The human readable and legal text of the CC BY 4.0 license can be found at this link:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

If you are reading this, you have, at a minimum, Parts Tracker submit privileges. While it is not required, I ask that all of you email [email protected] with the following:

"I accept the LDraw.org Contributor's Agreement dated 23-Feb-2022 with regards to all past and future contributions I make to LDraw.org".

There is some documentation and coding to do so the expected implementation of the CC BY 4.0 license will be the May or July update. I will not be suspending accounts or anything like that to enforce agreement (although expect an email nag from me if I don't hear from you) as the CC BY 2.0 is fine for us but it has some legal baggage that we want to avoid hence the revision.

Thank you and thank you for making the LDraw library what it is.

[Orion Pobursky]

New CA FAQs:

Why did we revise the CA?
The CC BY 2.0 license has some legal baggage that we wish to avoid. While we are in compliance with that license, we don't want human error to potentially cause problems.

Do I have to agree to the new CA?
No, your submissions will continue to be covered under the CC BY 2.0 license. However, we politely ask that you allow us to address any concerns you have and ultimately agree to the new CA. Additionally, past the implementation date, you will be required to agree to the new CA in order to submit parts.

What about authors who cannot be contacted to agree to the new CA?
As above, their submissions will continue to be covered under the CC BY 2.0 license.

How will I know which parts are covered by what license?
All changes to parts after implementation date will be covered under both the 2.0 and 4.0 licenses. Since the entire library will be updated with a new !LICENSE meta, this means that all parts will be considered derivative works of the original parts and be dual licensed. Those parts where the original author and all the !HISTORY line authors have affirmed the new CA will be solely licensed by 4.0 and that will be reflected in the !LICENSE line.

When is the implementation date?
This is TBD and depends on updating the PT software for compatibility with the new license scheme. Once a definite date has been determined, it will be announced here on the forums.