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How to use the licenses

This repository contains the licenses for the software or released by the Digital Transformation Team. Unless there are strong and explicit reasons to make an exception, this list also applies to the software developed on Developers Italia.

Brief summary

To correctly apply a license, you must:

choose a license from those proposed here;
copy it to the repository root, named LICENSE
create and compile the AUTHORS file always in the root of the repository.

How to choose the license

In particular, we suggest to use:

EUPL-1.2 for all traditional software, native and mobile applications.
AGPL-3.0-or-later for all standalone software used over the network.
BSD-3-Clause for software libraries
CC-BY-4.0 for documentation
CC0-1.0 for laws, schemas and other normative documents

How to fill in the AUTHORS file

The AUTHORS file contains three information:

the copyright holders;
moral rights holders: are the names of the individual authors of the code, so as to recognize also their moral rights (which in Italian law are inalienable) regardless of the copyright holders; in the case of employees or other subordination regime, in fact, the copyright is the employer while the moral rights remain with the actual author;
the words "The version control system provides attribution for specific lines of code" for mapping the correspondences between authors and single portions of code.

It is not mandatory to add your name to the two lists; it is recommended only for relevant code contributions. All contributions are in any case tracked by the version control system, but they could be lost in case of distribution of the code outside of GitHub and moreover from the commit history alone it is not clear whether the author of the commit has the copyright or not. This is why we recommend the AUTHORS file to list the rights holders.

An example of the AUTHORS file is available here

Further steps

AGPL-3.0-or-later

You need to create a README or README.md file that contains, at the bottom, the following text:

Copyright (c) the respective contributors, as shown by the AUTHORS file.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.