Policies

Every non-trivial contribution needs to be covered by a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA) from all original authors. We have modelled our policy based on the practice of the Apache Software Foundation. You can see their CLA policy here. Our policy is:

OpenSSL requires that all non-trivial contributors of ideas, code, or documentation complete, sign, and submit (via email, or postal mail) an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA). The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to OpenSSL and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time.

First issued 23 December 2014

Last modified 25 June 2025

From 3.0.0 and above, the OpenSSL versioning scheme uses the format: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH

With this format, API/ABI compatibility will be guaranteed for the same MAJOR version number.

• MAJOR: API/ABI incompatible changes will increase this number
• MINOR: API/ABI compatible feature releases will change this
• PATCH: Bug fix releases will increment this number. We also allow backporting of accessor functions in these releases.

This approximately aligns with the expectations of users who are familiar with semantic versioning. However, we have not adopted semantic versioning in the strict sense of its rules, because it would mean changing our current LTS policies and practices.