Climsoft Contributor's Agreement

Welcome!

The Climsoft Project invites users and interested people to become Contributors. Contributors are essential to the Climsoft Project, to provide bug reports and to do testing, to provide code for the core of Climsoft and also for additional modules, and to provide your ideas and challenges to the Project.

In order to become a Contributor, you must first download a copy of the Climsoft Contributors Agreement, read it carefully, fill in your name, address and email, then sign and date it. Then scan this to a file (preferably as a PDF). Now enter this assignment and upload the file through the "Add Submission" button below. It will then be checked by the Project Coordinator, and you will get an "OK" mark - this means you are now a registered Climsoft Contributor. If there are any errors, you will be asked to correct it and try again.

Note that you will not be able to see the "Add Submission" Button if you are not login into the Met-Elearning moodle site with your user profile (username and password). In case you don't have one on Met-Elearning moodle site,you can create this easily and enroll yourself in the Climsoft Course before you proceed by following the link:https://www.met-elearning.org/ then select the "Create new account" button;this will allow you to create your user profile account. After creating your account,select the climsoft course and enroll yourself to this course. You can now proceed and submit your Contributor Licence Agreement.

The aim of this Climsoft Contributors Agreement is to protect you, as well as the Climsoft Project.

If you are employed by a National Meteorological or Hydrological Service, it is important that you inform your Director and get agreement before you submit the Climsoft Contributors Agreement. If you are employed by another organisation involved in climate data and services, then you should get agreement from your line manager.

The Climsoft Contributors Agreement requires you to agree that your contributions are published under the GPL3 free open-source license. If you are an employee, your employer is likely to have intellectual property rights over anything that you publish connected with your work. Therefore you need to ensure that your employer agrees that you are allowed to make contributions to the Climsoft Project under free software terms. (Paragraphs 2 and 4)

Paragraphs 5 and 7 are about submitting your authentic contributions or contributions on behalf of others. If you copy and adapt code from somewhere else, write in the comments where it came from.

Paragraph 6 and the similar text in the GPL3 license protects you from any claims.

Paragraphs 3, 8 and 9 mean that you agree to inform the Climsoft Project about any issues or conflicts that you know about. Then the Climsoft Project Steering Group can decide what to do. This protects the Project from things going wrong without warning.