The 52°North Partner Network aims to foster innovation in the field of Geoinformatics by organizing a collaborative software development process. All contributions to the collaborative software development process are managed within our software repositories and published under a Free and Open Source Software License - a non-copy-left type of license. This gives potential academic, private business and public administration users maximum degrees of freedom to use, adapt and redistribute the software and derivative works in any combination with other software. Currently, most of our software is published under the GNU GLP V.2 license.

52°North GmbH collects the (non-exclusive) usage rights of all contributions. We require these usage rights in order to

• grant the Open Source license to potential users,
• change the terms of the Open Source License for a particular software project if necessary,
• exceptionally grant additional licenses with individual terms and conditions if required and
• take legal action against misuse of the software.

In addition to managing this software, we may also host third party software within our repositories. In this case the software is not managed by the 52°North GmbH and the terms and conditions, which apply to the use of this software, must be clearly stated.

More detailed information can be found in our Bylaws.