The 52°North Partner Network fosters innovation in the field of Geoinformatics by organizing a collaborative software development process. All software contributions are published under a Free and Open Source Software License. The aim is to provide 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 GPL V.2 license. Most future developments will use the Apache 2.0 license or similar non copy-left licenses.
52°North GmbH collects the non-exclusive usage rights of all contributions. All contributors sign a Contributors License Agreement (CLA) – a contract between contributors and 52°North, which grants 52°North the rights needed to manage and sublicense the software contributions as part of the 52°North software stack. 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 and
- exceptionally grant additional licenses with individual terms and conditions if required.
In addition to managing this software, we may also host open source projects, which are managed by other parties and thus are not covered by the CLA. In any case the copyright owner and the terms and conditions, which apply to the use of the software, are clearly stated by the copyright owner for each particular project in a license file.
More detailed information can be found in our Bylaws, CLA FAQ and Guidelines.