# Contributor License Agreement

Thank you for contributing to **albert**. Before we can merge your contribution,
we need you to agree to this Contributor License Agreement ("Agreement"). It
lets the project accept your work while keeping the licensing of albert coherent
and its future — including the four-year conversion to Apache 2.0 and any
commercial licensing — legally sound.

You keep the copyright to your contributions. This Agreement only grants
**LamantinAI** (the "Project", "we", "us") the rights it needs to distribute and
relicense the combined work.

By submitting a contribution (a pull request, patch, or any other form of
change) to albert, you ("You", the "Contributor") agree to the following.

## 1. Definitions

- **"Contribution"** means any original work of authorship — code,
  documentation, or other material — that You intentionally submit to the
  Project for inclusion in albert.
- **"Submit"** means any form of communication sent to the Project or its
  maintainers, including pull requests, patches, and issues, excluding
  communication conspicuously marked "Not a Contribution".

## 2. Copyright license

You grant LamantinAI, and to recipients of software distributed by LamantinAI,
a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright
license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly
perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative
works.

## 3. Right to relicense

You expressly agree that LamantinAI may license and sublicense Your
Contributions, in whole or in part, under **any license terms of its choosing**,
including without limitation:

- the Business Source License 1.1 under which albert is currently distributed,
  and any later version of it;
- the Apache License 2.0 (albert's Change License), on or before the Change Date;
- one or more separate **commercial** licenses.

This is the clause that keeps albert's dual-licensing and its scheduled
conversion to open source workable. You are not entitled to any compensation
for such licensing.

## 4. Patent license

You grant LamantinAI and recipients of albert a perpetual, worldwide,
non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated below) patent license
to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer
albert, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by You
that are necessarily infringed by Your Contribution alone or by combination of
Your Contribution with albert. If any entity institutes patent litigation
alleging that albert or a Contribution constitutes patent infringement, the
patent licenses granted under this Agreement for that Contribution terminate for
that entity.

## 5. Your representations

You represent that:

- Each Contribution is **Your original creation**, and You have the legal right
  to grant the licenses above.
- If Your Contribution includes work that is not Your original creation, You
  have identified it, along with the license or restriction (including the
  author) it is subject to, in the submission.
- If Your employer has rights to intellectual property You create, You have
  either received permission to make the Contribution on their behalf, or Your
  employer has waived such rights.
- Your Contributions are provided "AS IS", without warranty of any kind.

## 6. How to sign

For a pull request, add a line to the PR description:

```
I have read the CLA and I agree to it: <your name> <your email>
```

Earlier contributions to albert were made under the MIT License and remain
available under it; the move to BSL applies from the relicensing commit forward
and is not retroactive.