Contributor Agreements

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 postal mail, fax or email) 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.

A submission is trivial if it is considered trivial under copyright law. Since we are not lawyers, we place the bar for trivial contributions very high. For example: corrections of grammatical or typographical errors (including misspelled function names in manual pages), simple whitespace changes and in some cases one-line bugfixes might be accepted as trivial without requiring a CLA.

In practice, it is required that the author (in the git commit message) and all approving team members (in the pull request thread) agree that a change is trivial. The author has to add CLA: trivial in the commit message separated by an empty line from the rest of the message. The reviewers will normally post a statement to the effect of “I agree that it is a trivial change.”

When filling in the CLA, please make sure that the email address matches the one that you use for the “Author” in your git commits. List multiple email addresses if necessary.

For a corporation that has assigned employees to work on OpenSSL, a Corporate Contributor License Agreement (CCLA) is available for contributing intellectual property via the corporation, that may have been assigned as part of an employment agreement. Note that a Corporate CLA does not remove the need for every developer to sign their own ICLA as an individual.

If you have not already done so, please complete and sign a printout of the above ICLA (and CCLA if necessary), then scan and email a pdf file of the Agreement(s) to cla@openssl.org.

If you prefer snail mail, send an original signed Agreement to the

OpenSSL Software Foundation
40 East Main Street
Suite 744
Newark, DE 19711
United States

Please read the document(s) carefully before signing and keep a copy for your records.

Your Full name will be published unless you provide an alternative Public name. For example if your full name is Andrew Bernard Charles Dickens, but you wish to be known as Andrew Dickens, please enter the latter as your Public name. If you do not wish to have your name listed as a contributor, use Anonymous. We reserve the right to reject rude or obscene nick-names. The email address and other contact details are not published.