AgoraCart Contributor Agreement
What is an ACA?
ACA stands for AgoraCart Contributor Agreement. This is an agreement for those wishing to contribute any code, sample, patch, add-on, module, graphic, template, layout file, etc to AgoraCart.
We are asking all moderators, code contributors as well as those that supply graphics and/or templates to AgoraCart to sign an AgoraCart Contributor Agreement.
If you are in one of these positions and/or want to make significant contributions, please download the ACA here .
Why do we need a contributor agreement?
This is a good question. Strictly speaking, we don't. We could distribute AgoraCart just like we always have without an agreement, and the world wouldn't end.
But there are a couple key advantages that a contributor agreement gives to the health of the project. First, the agreement provides information and assurances that allow confidence in the copyright status of the codebase.
Second, the agreement allows us some license flexibility. If, for example, we need to create a license for non-electronic documentation, the contributor agreement lets us do that. Or if we want to LGPL a specific piece of AgoraCart, the agreement gives us the ability to do that too. This sort of flexibility lets us respond to the changing needs of a growing project.
Who must sign the ACA before contributing?
Ideally, everybody who contributes to AgoraCart, AgoraCart Gold, or any other K-Factor Technologies, Inc (KFT) supported project would sign the ACA. But we are aware that some contributors will not want to take the extra effort, especially for one-time contributors of modest amounts of code. As a compromise, the AgoraCart Project requires an ACA from anybody who makes a significant contribution to AgoraCart or any other KFT project. "Significant" is, of course, a judgment call. As a guideline, if you have more than 100 lines of code in the codebase or a design template, we need an ACA. Additionally, to be granted commit access to our source code repository, if available, we will need an ACA.
What rights do I give up when I sign the ACA?
The primary consequence of agreeing to the ACA is that, having granted the AgoraCart Project a series of rights, you can't grant those rights to others on an exclusive basis.