Licensing and Copyrights

TRD: 4
Working Group: Core
Type: Best Current Practice
Status: Final
Author: Pat Pannuto

Abstract

This document describes Tock’s policy on licensing and copyright. It explains the rationale behind the license selection (dual-license, MIT or Apache2) and copyright policy (optional, and authors may retain copyright if desired). It further outlines how licensing and copyright shall be handled throughout projects under the Tock umbrella.

Explicitly not discussed in this TRD are issues of trademark, the Tock brand, logos, or other non-code assets and artifacts.

1 Introduction

Tock’s goal is to provide a safe, secure, and efficient operating system for microcontroller-class devices. The Tock project further believes it is important to enable and support widespread adoption of safe, secure, and efficient software. Tock also seeks to be an open and inclusive project, and Tock welcomes contributions from any individuals or entities wishing to improve the safety, security, reliability, efficiency, or usability of Tock and the Tock ecosystem.

The intent of these policies is to best satisfy the needs of all stakeholders in the Tock ecosystem.

2 Licensing

All software artifacts under the umbrella of the Tock project are dual-licensed as Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0) or MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).

All contributions to the Tock kernel (the code hosted at https://github.com/tock/tock) MUST be licensed under these terms.

3 Copyright

Entities contributing resources to open-source projects often require attribution to recognize their efforts. Copyright notices are a common means to provide this. For downstream users, the license terms of Tock ensures unencumbered use.

Copyrights in Tock projects are retained by their contributors. No copyright assignment is required to contribute to Tock projects.

Artifacts in the Tock project MAY include explicit copyright notices. Substantial updates to an artifact MAY add additional copyright notices to an artifact. In general, modifications to a file are expected to retain existing copyright notices.

For full authorship information, see the version control history.

4 Implementation

Where possible, all textual files that allow comments MUST include a license notice and copyright notice(s). Files that are not authored by Tock contributors (such as files copied from other projects) are exempt from this policy.

Copyright notices SHOULD include a year. Newer copyright notices SHOULD be placed after existing copyright notices. If non-trivial updates are performed by an original copyright author, they MAY amend the year(s) indicated on their existing copyright statement or MAY add an additional copyright line, at their discretion.

4.1 Format

License and copyright information SHOULD have at least one (1) blank line separating it from any other content in the file.

Text described in this section SHOULD be pre-fixed or post-fixed with technically necessary characters (i.e. to mark as a comment in source code) as appropriate.

The first line of license text SHOULD appear as-follows:

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT License.

The second line of license SHOULD adhere to the SPDX specification for license description. As of this writing, it SHOULD appear as-follows:

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR MIT

The current (v2.3) normative rules permit case-insensitive matches of the license identifier but require case-sensitive matching of the disjunction operator. To simplify enforcement of licensing and documentation rules, license information SHOULD preserve case as-shown in the SPDX license list (i.e. as-presented above).

Copyright {entity} {year}([,year],[-year]).

The {entity} field should reflect the entity wishing to claim copyright. The {year} field SHOULD reflect when the copyright is first established. Substantial updates in the future MAY indicate renewed copyright, via additional comma-separated years or via range syntax, at the copyright holder’s discretion. The initial year SHALL NOT be removed unless it is the express intent of the copyright holder to relinquish the initial copyright.

4.1.1 Examples

The common-case format is:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT License.
// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR MIT
// Copyright Tock Contributors <YYYY>.

//! Module-level documentation...
}

placed at the top of the file.

If you wish to specifically call out the contribution by you or your company, you may do so by adding another copyright line:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT License.
// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR MIT
// Copyright Tock Contributors <YYYY>.
// Copyright <you/your company> <YYYY>.

//! Module-level documentation...
}

A file with a long history and multiple copyrights may look as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT License.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR MIT
# Copyright Tock Contributors 2014.
# Copyright Pat Pannuto 2014,2016-2018,2021.
# Copyright Amit Levy 2016-2019.
# Copyright Bradford James Campbell 2022.

set -e
...

Many additional examples are available throughout the Tock repositories.

4.2 Enforcement

To ensure coverage and compliance with these policies, the Core Team SHALL author and maintain tooling which checks the presence and expected format of license and copyright information. This SHOULD be automated and integrated with continuous integration systems. Contributions which do not satisfy these license and copyright rules MUST NOT be accepted.

In exceptional situations, consensus from the Core Team MAY circumvent this policy. Such situations MUST include public explanation and public record of non-anonymized vote results. This is not expected to ever occur.

5 Author’s Address

Pat Pannuto
3202 EBU3, Mail Code #0404
9500 Gilman Dr
La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
ppannuto@ucsd.edu

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