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If you have questions about any aspect of the OpenMRS Contribution Policy, please contact community@openmrs.org. 

Contributions of Intellectual Property

Software includes both functional and expressive works, and it sometimes arrives encumbered with many varieties of legal interests that can be owned, licensed, monopolized or sold, or limited for its use in derivative or advanced software,The OpenMRS project collects such contributed software into larger packages that we distribute as collective works under the MPL 2.0 HD license. To do so, we must ensure that the open source licenses applying to those contributions are compatible with MPL 2.0 HD and that there are no intellectual property encumbrances that would prevent the use of our collective software for health care delivery worldwide.

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1. We accept contributions only from people who identify themselves with an account on OpenMRS websites (an "OpenMRS ID"). Each person's profile, and all other materials he or she posts on OpenMRS websites, is available to the public. See the OpenMRS Privacy Policy for more information.
2. All contributions are required to be the contributor's own work licensed to OpenMRS under an approved open source license, or a work that is licensed to that contributor for redistribution to OpenMRS under an approved open source license. OpenMRS project teams have responsibility for knowing their contributors and those contributions, as would be expected of any professional software project. Random contributions from unknown project participants without information suitable for a NOTICE file are likely not to be accepted by an OpenMRS project.
3. OpenMRS projects may accept ideas, suggestions, bug fixes, and other similar contributions from the public. The professional and academic rules of behavior in such situations say that we should identify and acknowledge those informal and formal contributions. A NOTICE file included with each OpenMRS distribution will identify the provenance of all contributions, to the best of the contributors' and the project team's current knowledge and belief. Each contributor is responsible for providing enough information so that the appropriate OpenMRS project team can prepare a correct NOTICE file.

Contents of the NOTICE File

The NOTICE file that accompanies every formal distribution of software by an OpenMRS project identifies each third-party component in that software and the open source or Creative Commons license under which that component is available to the public. The following information, if available, will also be included in the NOTICE file:

• 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 Inc."
• 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 2.0 with Health Care Disclaimer (MPL 2.0 HD) under which OpenMRS distributes software and documentation. 

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