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The OpenMRS Community Accepts Contributions

None of us does this OpenMRS project by ourselves. We accept from each other software, documentation, ideas, bug fixes, and anything else of value (including money), and we use that to create open source medical record systems and other health resources for the world.

Our Contribution Policy is simple: Voluntary contributions are gratefully accepted as long as the OpenMRS community and all downstream users are allowed to use those contributions for our public benefit mission.

The remainder of this document focuses on contributions of intellectual property, although we encourage you to make in-kind and financial contributions to OpenMRS as well.

Contributions of Intellectual Property

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 intellectual property contributions of all sorts and then collects 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 the OpenMRS Copyright Policy. 

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

  1. We accept contributions only from people who identify themselves with an account on the OpenMRS website. Each person's profile, and all other materials he or she posts on the OpenMRS website, is available to the public. See the OpenMRS Simplified 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 the like 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 contributor's and the project team's current knowledge and belief. Each contributor is responsible for providing enough information so that the OpenMRS project team can prepare a correct NOTICE file.

Contents of the NOTICE File

The NOTICE file that will accompany every formal distribution of software by an OpenMRS project will identify 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 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.

 

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