# NovaClaw Individual Contributor License Agreement

**Version 1.0**

Thank you for contributing to NovaClaw. This agreement clarifies the terms under which your
contribution is accepted, so that NovaClaw can be distributed and relicensed with certainty about
who holds which rights.

**You keep the copyright in your contribution.** This is a *license*, not a transfer of ownership.
You may use your own contribution however else you like, including in other projects.

Please read this, fill in the details at the bottom, and send it as described in
[CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md). You only need to do this once — it covers all of your future
contributions.

---

## 1. Definitions

**"You"** means the individual who signs this agreement.

**"NovaClaw"** means the NovaClaw software project. **"We"**, **"us"** and **"our"** mean
Nancy Sadkov, the copyright holder of NovaClaw.

**"Contribution"** means any work of authorship that you intentionally submit to us for inclusion in
NovaClaw — source code, documentation, configuration, tests, designs, translations, or other
material — in any form and by any means of communication, including patches, pull requests, emailed
diffs, and messages. It does not include anything you clearly mark in writing as "Not a
Contribution".

## 2. Copyright license

You grant us a **perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable** license in your
Contribution to:

- reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute it;
- prepare and distribute derivative works of it; and
- **sublicense these rights, and relicense your Contribution, under any license terms we choose** —
  including open-source licenses, source-available licenses such as the Functional Source License,
  and proprietary or commercial licenses.

You retain all ownership of the copyright in your Contribution.

The sublicensing and relicensing right is the operative part of this agreement. It is what allows
NovaClaw to change its license, to offer a commercial license to a customer, and to honour the
Apache 2.0 future-license grant in [LICENSE](LICENSE) — none of which is possible for a
contribution we cannot relicense.

## 3. Patent license

You grant us and every recipient of NovaClaw a **perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free,
irrevocable** patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import and otherwise
transfer your Contribution and the works it is combined into. This applies only to patent claims you
own or control that are necessarily infringed by your Contribution alone or by its combination with
NovaClaw.

If you institute patent litigation against anyone alleging that NovaClaw or a Contribution in it
infringes a patent, the patent licenses you granted under this section terminate.

## 4. Your assurances

You confirm that:

1. **The work is yours.** Each Contribution is your original creation, and you have the legal right
   to grant the licenses above.
2. **Nobody else has a claim on it.** Your Contribution is not subject to any agreement, employment
   term, license, or obligation that conflicts with this agreement. If your employer has rights in
   work you create, you have permission to make the Contribution on your own behalf, or your
   employer has waived those rights or signed a separate agreement with us.
3. **Third-party material is disclosed.** If any part of your Contribution is not your original work
   — code you copied, adapted, or generated from another licensed source — you will submit it
   separately from your own work, clearly marked, with the source, author, and license identified,
   and you will not include material whose license is incompatible with NovaClaw's.
4. **You will tell us if this changes.** If you later learn that any statement above is or has become
   inaccurate, you will notify us promptly.

## 5. What this agreement does not do

- It creates **no obligation on us to use, merge, or keep** your Contribution. We may modify,
  reject, or remove it at any time, for any reason.
- It creates **no employment, partnership, or agency relationship**, and no right to payment.
- Except for the assurances in section 4, you provide your Contribution **"as is", without
  warranties of any kind**, express or implied. You are not liable for damages arising from our use
  of it.

## 6. Governing law

This agreement is governed by the laws of the Netherlands. Disputes fall to the competent courts of
the Netherlands. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

---

## Signature

By completing and sending this form, you agree to the terms above for all Contributions you make to
NovaClaw, now and in the future.

```
Full name:          ______________________________________________

Email address:      ______________________________________________

Public identifier:  ______________________________________________
                    (the name or handle your commits are authored
                     under, if different from your full name)

Country:            ______________________________________________

Date:               ______________________________________________

Signature:          ______________________________________________
                    (type your full name — a typed name sent from
                     the email address above counts as a signature)
```

Send it as described in [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md).

---

## For companies

If you are contributing **on behalf of an employer or a company**, or your employment contract gives
your employer rights in the code you write, this individual agreement is not enough on its own. Get
in touch and we will sort out a corporate agreement — it is a short document and not a problem.
