For our protection, and yours, we need to have formal agreements in place with our contributors. These agreements are the easiest way for you to formally give us permission to use and redistribute your contributions. In effect, you’re giving us a licence to your work, but you still own the copyright — so you retain the right to modify your work and use it in other projects.

We do not require the transfer of copyright; we simply want to know that you have the legal right to contribute to the Trinity Desktop Project under our open-source licenses before using and redistributing your work. We also want to make sure that you know once a contribution is made it cannot be forcibly removed from the project against our will by you or other interested parties — per the legal definitions of open source, once released the work can be legally copied and distributed by anyone at any time.

We have two separate Contributor License Agreement (CLA) forms: one for individual contributors and one for companies and other organisations. If you are employed by a firm that has an interest in any intellectual property you create (this includes, but is not limited to, all engineering firms and many information technology firms), you must have your employer verify that you are authorized to enter into this agreement before signing and returning the form. If your employer does not approve, you may not make any contributions to the Trinity Desktop Project either now or in the future.

To contribute, please complete the appropriate form above, then either:
Fax the completed form to +1 (415) 639-6630
-or-
Email the completed form with a verified GPG digital signature to tpearson@raptorengineeringinc.com.

When contributing please include a "Signed-off-by: Your Name <your email>" line with your patches and/or commits to GIT. By including this line you are stating that you have the legal right to license the work to us under the terms of our CLA, and that you understand and agree to the CLA. If there is no signed CLA matching the "Signed-off-by" line on file with us the work will be rejected.

If you do not have the legal right to license the work to us you must not add a "Signed-off-by" line to that work; if the entity holding the appropriate legal rights does not sign off on the affected work it cannot be contributed to the Trinity Desktop Project. For example, if your employer holds the legal copyright on your work and has a CLA on file with us, that employer needs to generate an appropriate "Signed-off-by" line for your contribution. You will still get authorship credit for your work in this situtation; GIT records the author and legal rights holder of a work in two separate locations.

Digital signatures of each document by the Trinity Desktop Project:
Individual contributors (GPG)
Companies and other organisations (GPG)