# MailFathom Contributor Licence Agreement **Version 1.1** Thank you for contributing to MailFathom. This agreement records the terms under which your contribution is accepted. It is a licence, not a transfer: **you keep the copyright in everything you write.** You accept it once, on a pull request to MailFathom, by posting the sentence [*Accepting the agreement*](#5-accepting-the-agreement) names. It then covers every contribution you make to MailFathom and to every other Organization repository, including the ones you have already submitted, until a new version of this document replaces it. ## Why this exists MailFathom is published under the [GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3](LICENSE), SPDX identifier `AGPL-3.0-only`. That licence has no clause placing an inbound contribution under the project's own terms — Apache-2.0, which MailFathom carried until 2026, had one in its section 5 and the AGPL has no equivalent. So this agreement carries the first of the three things below rather than merely adding to it, and clause 2.1 is what makes your contribution usable. The second is the freedom to publish MailFathom under other terms later — a different open-source licence, or a commercial licence sold beside it. Without this agreement a single merged contribution would make that decision impossible to take without finding and asking every past contributor individually. This agreement keeps the decision open, and the move from Apache-2.0 to AGPL-3.0-only is the first time it was taken. It announces no further one. The third is your statement that the code was yours to give. A licence says which terms a contribution arrives under; it does not say that the person submitting it was entitled to submit it. Section 3 below is where you say so. The same three things are owed in every other repository the Owner keeps in the same organization, whatever licence it carries and whether or not it is published, so the agreement reaches all of them rather than MailFathom alone. ## 1. Definitions **"You"** means the individual accepting this agreement, or the legal entity on whose behalf it is accepted. An entity and the individuals controlling, controlled by, or under common control with it are one **"You"** for the purposes of this agreement. **"Contribution"** means any work of authorship you intentionally submit for inclusion in an Organization repository — code, tests, documentation, configuration, deployment assets, or anything else — including every modification to an existing work. Submission means any form of communication sent to the maintainers or to an Organization repository for the purpose of having the work included, whether by pull request, patch, issue, or otherwise. Communication you conspicuously mark **"Not a Contribution"** is excluded. **"MailFathom"** means the project hosted at and the works distributed from it. **"Organization repository"** means MailFathom and every other repository, public or private, in the GitHub organization [`fathomise`](https://github.com/fathomise) that the Owner administers, and the works distributed from any of them. **"Owner"** means Krzysztof Kasprowicz, a sole trader established in the Republic of Poland and trading as **IMPE**, who is the copyright holder of record named in [`NOTICE`](NOTICE) and whose GitHub account is [`Krzysztof318`](https://github.com/Krzysztof318); and any successor the agreement is assigned to under clause 2.4. The Organization repositories are hosted under the GitHub organization `fathomise`, which the Owner administers. That organization is where they are kept and nothing more: it is not a party to this agreement, hosting a repository there transfers no right in it, and the Owner remains its owner. Where the Owner has to be identified beyond that — in a transaction, or in a dispute — the business registration behind the trading name is what identifies them, and it is supplied on request rather than published here. ## 2. Grants **2.1 Copyright licence.** You grant the Owner a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free copyright licence to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such derivative works, **under any licensing terms the Owner chooses**, including terms that differ from the licence the Organization repository carries when you submit it and including proprietary terms. This is the clause that carries your contribution into the Organization repository you submit it to and that keeps future licensing decisions available. It is non-exclusive: your own rights in your Contribution are undiminished, and you may use, license, and distribute it however you wish, to anyone, on any terms. **2.2 Patent licence.** You grant the Owner and every recipient of an Organization repository a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free patent licence to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer your Contribution, covering only those claims of your patents that are necessarily infringed by your Contribution alone or by its combination with the Organization repository it was submitted to. For MailFathom this grant matches section 11 of the GNU Affero General Public License; it is stated here in its own right so it survives a change of licence made under clause 2.1 and holds in a repository that carries a different licence or none. If you institute patent litigation against anyone alleging that an Organization repository or a Contribution in one constitutes patent infringement, the patent licences granted to you under this agreement terminate on the day the action is filed. **2.3 What is not granted.** No trademark rights are granted. Nothing here transfers ownership of your Contribution, and nothing here obliges the Owner to use, merge, or distribute it. **2.4 Who holds these rights.** The Owner may assign this agreement, and the rights granted under it, to a successor in interest to the Organization repositories — a company the Owner forms or controls, or an acquirer of the project — and the assignee then stands in the Owner's place. No further acceptance is asked of you when that happens, which is the point of saying so here rather than discovering later that every past contributor has to be found again. An assignee takes the obligations with the rights: your Contribution stays yours, clause 2.1 stays non-exclusive, and nothing an assignment does can enlarge what you granted. ## 3. What you state By accepting this agreement you state that: 1. each Contribution is your original creation, or you have the right to submit it under this agreement; 2. you are legally entitled to grant the licences in clause 2, and no agreement with an employer or any other party prevents it — where your employer has rights in work you create, you have permission to contribute on their behalf, or your employer has waived those rights, or your employer has accepted this agreement; 3. every third-party work in a Contribution is identified in the pull request that carries it, together with the licence it arrives under and any restriction attached to it, and is compatible with the terms the Organization repository it is submitted to is distributed under; 4. no Contribution contains a credential, token, private key, real mailbox content, or any identifiable personal information; and 5. you will tell the Owner if any of the above stops being true. A Contribution you did not write, or did not write alone, may still be submitted — you mark it as such in the pull request, name where it came from, and submit it separately from your own work. ## 4. No warranty and no obligation A Contribution is provided **as is**, without warranty or condition of any kind, express or implied. You are not obliged to provide support for a Contribution, and you may withdraw that support at any time without notice. Nothing in this agreement requires the Owner to accept, review, or keep a Contribution. ## 5. Accepting the agreement Accepting is one comment on a pull request to MailFathom, from the GitHub account that authored it: ```text I have read the MailFathom Contributor Licence Agreement and I accept it. ``` Post that sentence as the whole of your comment, with nothing before it and nothing after. Casing, surrounding whitespace, and a trailing full stop are ignored; anything else is not, because a sentence quoted inside a question about whether to accept is not an acceptance and nothing reading the comment afterwards could tell the two apart. MailFathom is the one place the agreement is accepted, for every Organization repository. A contribution to another of them is covered by the acceptance you gave on MailFathom, and that repository asks for nothing of its own. The `Contributor licence` workflow reads the comment, records the acceptance, and turns the `license/cla` status green. What it records — your GitHub account and its numeric id, the pull request and the comment that carried the acceptance, the version of this agreement, and the exact revision of this file you accepted — lives on the `cla-signatures` branch of MailFathom's repository, in the open, and is not sent anywhere else. That branch is the only register of acceptances for every Organization repository. That record is the evidence the agreement exists; it holds no more of your data than the pull request already does. Once recorded, you never do this again. A later version of this agreement is a new acceptance, asked for in the same way. ## 6. Governing terms This agreement is governed by the law of the Republic of Poland, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If a provision is held unenforceable, the rest stands. --- This agreement is adapted from the [Apache Software Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement](https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf), which is published under the Apache License, Version 2.0.