# MCPlica Contributor License Agreement Policy

MCPlica requires a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for external code contributions and intentionally does **not** use DCO.

The intended CLA model is a **license CLA, not copyright assignment**:

- contributors retain copyright ownership in their contributions;
- contributors grant the project/founder broad, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free rights needed to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, sublicense as required for project operation, and maintain contributions within the open-source project;
- appropriate patent grants/representations are required;
- contributors represent that they have authority to submit the contribution;
- entity/corporate authorization is required where an employer or other entity controls the relevant rights;
- signing a CLA grants no governance, maintainer, sponsorship, roadmap, or voting rights;
- the project remains AGPL-3.0-only and does not use the CLA as a proprietary dual-licensing escape hatch under the current governance policy.

**Before accepting external contributions, replace/confirm this operational policy with the founder-approved final Individual CLA and Entity CLA legal text, install the approved verification service, and set `CLA_STATUS_CONTEXT` to the exact commit-status or check-run name it publishes.** The repository workflow verifies that external result without executing pull-request code. The authoritative governance intent is `docs/open_source_and_sponsorship_model.md`.