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The term "intellectual property" is fraught with difficulty in the software world. Software includes both ideas and expressive works, and it arrives encumbered with many varieties of legal interests that can be owned, licensed, monopolized or sold, and integrated into derivative or advanced software,

The OpenMRS project accepts projects accept intellectual property contributions of all sorts and then collects collect them in OpenMRS software distributions that are licensed to the public under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0). To better understand the implications of that license, see As is described in the OpenMRS Copyright Policy. , we respect all copyrights and copyright licenses.

To ensure licensing consistency, we take steps to determine that contributions of intellectual property are not encumbered. These are the steps:

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• Copyright notices supplied by the licensor(s) of any part of the software. OpenMRS project teams may elect to remove individual copyright notices that detract from the "community" ethos of the project, but individual copyrights will still be protected by a legally-effective and encompassing copyright notice such as "Copyright (C) 2014 OpenMRS LLC."
• Patent notices identifying specific patents or patent claims that may read on the software. Contributors and all project team members are expected to disclose any patent claims of which they are aware. In the event that possible patent claims may be confidential, the contributor must disclose enough about them to alert the public about possible future encumbrances. 
• Identification of industry standards implemented by the software. 
• OpenMRS projects and contributors may also include acknowledgement and attribution to individuals, companies or other organizations for significant portions of the software or its documentation, or who contributed in other ways to the project as a whole.
• Other important notices that the OpenMRS project team or its contributors want to share with the downstream users of that software.

Approved Open Source Licenses for OpenMRS Contributions

OpenMRS relies on the recommendations of Open Source Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, and Creative Commons to determine which free and open source licenses are compatible with the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0) under which OpenMRS distributes software and documentation. 

Some of those licenses may not be compatible with the license requirements of some commercial companies. That is another purpose of the NOTICE file that OpenMRS projects provide with each software distribution. Each user or distributor of OpenMRS software and documentation is responsible for making such license compatibility determinations for itself.