Thank you for your interest in contributing to WebODF. This page describes the established guidelines for contributions of code, patches and artwork to WebODF.
In order to clarify the intellectual property license granted with contributions from any person or entity, KO GmbH, as maintainer of WebODF, must have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) on file that has been signed by each Contributor, indicating agreement to certain license terms. This license is not only for the protection of the contributors themselves, but also for the protection of the project and its users; it does not change your rights to use your own Contributions for any other purpose.
All past and future contributors of non-trivial amounts of code (more than just a line or two) to WebODF are required to sign the CLA. If somebody is unable to sign the document, their contribution will not be accepted or will be removed from WebODF.
(This document based on MuseScore CLA, Version 1.0 - http://musescore.org/cla )
"A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically open source." Quote from Wikipedia
The license agreement is a legal document in which you state you are entitled to contribute the code to WebODF and are willing to have it used in distributions and derivative works. This means that ''should'' there be any kind of legal issue in the future as to the origins and ownership of any particular piece of code, KO GmbH has the necessary forms on file from the contributor(s) saying they were permitted to make this contribution.
The CLA also ensures that once you have provided a contribution, you cannot try to withdraw permission for its use at a later date. People and companies can therefore use WebODF, confident that they will not be asked to stop using pieces of the code at a later date.
Being able to make a clear statement about the origins of the code is very important as WebODF is adopted by large organizations who are necessarily cautious about adopting products with unknown origins. We wish for WebODF to be used and distributed as widely as possible and in order to do this with confidence, we need to be sure about the origins and continuing existence of the code.
No. This is one of the reasons WebODF requires a CLA. No individual contributor can hold such a threat over the entire community of users. Once you make a contribution, you are saying KO GmbH can use that piece of code forever.
Trivial patches like spelling fixes or missing words won't require an agreement, since anybody could do those. However, almost anything else will require a CLA.
webodf-cla.pdf - WebODF Contributor License Agreement