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<document>
    <properties>
        <title>Clirr Ant Task</title>
        <author>Lars Kühne</author>
    </properties>
    <body>
        <section name="Contributing to Clirr">
            <p>
                If you have made an improvement to the Clirr source code, documentation,
                or anything else, please consider contributing it back to the community.
            </p>
            <p>
                You can place patches or new code in the sourceforge patch
                tracker. Please send an announcement and explanations to the
                clirr developer mailing list.
            </p>
            <p>
                Note that anything you contribute must have the same license
                as the rest of Clirr, i.e. LGPL, Copyright Lars Kühne.
            </p>
        </section>
        <section name="Copyright Lars? Why not copyright myself?">
            <p>
                Licensing does matter and can get very confusing to maintain.
                Handing over copyrights to Lars keeps things simple for us
                to manage licensing issues. We do this for free and do not
                want to waste time on legal issues and managing
                who has copyright of which parts of the code.
                The only safe option is to have people hand over copyright to
                a person (like Lars) or an organisation (like Apache).
            </p>
            <p>
                Some people feel that handing over copyright to Lars
                limits their rights in the code they contribute.
            </p>
            <p>
                In fact it doesn't. Think about it: You give copyright to Lars,
                Lars immediately gives you the right to use the code under LGPL.
                What have you lost? You can still
            </p>
            <ul>
                <li>claim authorship in the Javadoc or other comments,
                    so credit goes where it should.</li>
                <li>redistribute the code in source or binary form
                    (provided the terms of the LGPL are met).</li>
                <li>use the code in a commercial environment or link it into IDEs.</li>
                <li>fork the codebase if you are not happy with the way
                    Lars is running the project.</li>
            </ul>
            <p>
                Because the code is licensed under the LGPL,
                the only thing you give up by assigning copyright to Lars
                is the right to veto a re-licensing of the code.
                For example Lars could re-license Clirr under
                the Apache license without having to contact
                everybody who has ever contributed.
                Note that you would not lose any of the work you (and others)
                have done as it would still be licensed under LGPL - <em>noone
                can ever take these rights away from you</em>!
            </p>
        </section>
    </body>
</document>
