Legal

This page details GNOME’s legal guidelines and requirements for development projects.

Licensing

As an open source project, GNOME requires that all its modules be licensed using an OSI approved license (see the SPDX license list for reference). This includes repositories of assets and resources, as well as code.

The primary licenses used in GNOME are:

• GNU General Public License, versions 2 and 3

• GNU Lesser Public License, version 2

• Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CCBYSA)

Each module’s license should be included in its COPYING file.

Copyright Notices

While they are not strictly necessary, it is recommended that source code files include a copyright notice.

Some guidelines:

• Existing copyright notices should not be removed

• Avoid copyright notices for individual contributors, since this can lead to maintenance overhead

• For new files, the following copyright notice is recommended: Copyright the <Module Name> authors

For more information, see this article.

Copyright Assignment

The GNOME project has a policy of rejecting copyright assignment.