The current gvSIG official projects copyright holder is the gvSIG Association. Any contribution to the gvSIG project requires to sign our contributor's agreement and send it by regular mail or by fax to gvSIG (this is an unfortunate consequence of copyright law in some jurisdictions). This requirement does not apply to external modules, localizations, documentation, except if they are contributed to us. It only applies to contributions that will be part of the core products.

The objective of contributor agreement is to protect the integrity of the project, its users and developers. The contributor agreement transfers the contributor's copyright to gvSIG who grants a non-exclusive license back to allow the contributor to use his/her own work. The rationale behind the agreement is:

1. In case of a legal claim, having a single copyright owner makes it easier to defend the interests of the gvSIG users and developers. The gvSIG Association is committed to defend gvSIG projects in the event of any claim or infringement by third parties.
2. The gvSIG Association can relicense its works under any other license in the future. When starting an open source project, the choice of license is intended to be permanent, but the experience of the past few years is that the ability to relicense a project is a useful tool in meeting challenges for open source projects. Not having that flexibility may be a drawback. Without the agreement, every single contributor must be contacted and unanimity reached in order to relicense a code base, or parts of the code must be reimplemented. This is true for all but the most permissively-licensed open source projects.
3. The contributors assert that their contributions are original and not protected by any patents. It guarantees to all contributors in the project that all the contributions are original.

Contributor's agreements are standard procedure in open source projects followed by projects ranging from the Free Software Foundation to the OpenOffice.org project, including the Apache project, on which this agreement is loosely based.

If you are not contributing code within the framework of a company or an institution, (i.e. your work is done as an individual), you have just to sign the contribution agreement and send it to the gvSIG Association.

If you are a company, please ensure that someone authorised to sign on behalf of the company signs the agreement and lists the names of people that agreements covers. This is usually done by a senior manager in the organization. This helps to reduce the number of individuals agreements to be signed.

If you have any question regarding this contract please contact us gvsig-legal@gvsig.com.