Contributor License Agreement

We ask all code contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), and unfortunately we cannot accept code contributions without this.

We use a github-based tool called CLA assistant. The first time you create a pull request in github the cla-assistant bot will comment with instructions on how to sign.

You can read the CLA here.

Why do we ask you to sign a CLA?

As ThoughtWorks was transferring ownership of Bahmni to the newly-formed Bahmni Coalition (under fiscal sponsorship of OpenMRS Inc), the Coalition had multiple rounds of discussion about the best way to balance between:

wanting the strongest possible open-source license (AGPL 3.0)
uncertainty about how best to grow Bahmni years down the road

We decided that the best way forward was to continue using the AGPL 3.0 license, but to ensure that in the future we could switch to another open-source license if we later realized that Bahmni could have a larger impact with a more permissive license like MPL. (If a license change were to ever happen it would following the Bahmni Coalition Governing Committee's voting process defined at https://om.rs/bahmni-governance.)

We also want to support dual-licensing in a specific scenario: if someone needs a version of Bahmni that is not under AGPL (perhaps they want to proprietary changes without sharing them; perhaps they have organizational restrictions against GPL) then on a case-by-case basis we would allow them to pay for a commercially-licensed version of Bahmni, and we would invest all revenue generated into further developing the main open-source version.

In order to allow the Bahmni Coalition to potentially change the Bahmni license or dual-license, we require all contributors to sign a CLA granting OpenMRS Inc (the fiscal sponsor for the Bahmni Coalition) a broad license over your contribution.

Have any questions or concerns about this? Ask on the discussion forums. (See Communication Channels and Tools (Discourse & Slack).)