GPL Cooperation Commitment for Projects (GPL-CC-1.0)

A project may wish to adopt the GPL Cooperation Commitment for all contributions going forward. Simply put the COMMITMENT file in the same directory in your source repository as the GPLv2, LGPLv2 or LGPLv2.1 license file.

How does this work “for all contributions going forward”?

Typically, all contributions to open source/free software projects are licensed under the project’s outbound license, a practice sometimes known as “inbound=outbound”. The Projects version of the GPL Cooperation Commitment (SPDX short identifier GPL-CC-1.0) applies to “each contributor to this repository as of the date of inclusion of this file, including subsidiaries of a corporate contributor”. For an inbound=outbound project, this means that anyone who contributes after the project adopts GPL-CC-1.0 agrees to license their contributions under the outbound license along with the additional permission embodied in GPL-CC-1.0.

On the other hand, if a contributor to the project prior to the date of the project’s inclusion of GPL-CC-1.0 never contributes further to the project after that date, then the additional permission embodied in GPL-CC-1.0 does not apply to that contributor.

Can I use GPL-CC-1.0 with a new project?

Yes. In this case, GPL-CC-1.0 applies from inception to all contributors to the project.

Following best practices for license identification, we recommend that new projects adopting GPL-CC-1.0 use the appropriate SPDX license expression in source files. For example:

SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later WITH GPL-CC-1.0

We encourage new projects adopting SPDX license expressions in source files to do so in conjunction with the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).