The Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is the copyright assignment in use for FSFE's fiduciary programme. FSFE's fiduciary policy is described here. The FLA allows Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to act as the legal guardian for Free Software projects. FSFE consolidates and manages the legal side of things while developers focus on the project and its development. As a partner of the SELF consortium, FSFE performs this service also for SELF, both for the SELF platform and for educational materials submitted to the project.

Why enter the Fiduciary Licence Agreement?

Signing the Fiduciary Licence Agreement takes care of major headaches for software developers, in particular

• Licence enforcement

Copyleft licences are based on the notion that freedom and software should be inseparable. This distinguishes them from non-protective Free Software licences. The Copyleft principle occasionally makes it necessary to take measures against violation of the license by parties who strip freedom from the software. Such compliance work can be difficult both legally and technically, and requires significant effort.

• Licence updates

All licences are interpreted on the basis of current law and technology. Both are changing, and licences need to adapt to these change, as also demonstrated by the recent GNU GPL v3 process. For a project's licence to be able to evolve along with the legal and technical basis, all Copyright holders need to agree to a licence change. Especially for larger projects with hundreds of contributors, some of who may already be dead or missing, this can be a major headache. Consolidating Copyright is a proven way of addressing these issues.

Because potential legal issues can provide a great obstacle to adoption of a Free Software project, addressing such issues can help to build confidence into a project.

Can the FLA be used for Educational Material?

Yes. A collection of evolving learning materials faces much the same issues than software, including concerns by contributors that their contributions might be abused in the future. Using the FLA for educational materials in SELF allows to increase confidence into the long-term freedom of the collaboratively created learning materials.

How to use the Fiduciary Licence Agreement?

If you want to contribute software or software documentation to the SELF platform, you should print out two copies of the SELF Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA), fill in your personal details and sign both copies. Send the copies to FSFE's Freedom Task Force in Zurich, Switzerland. In order to simplify the process, you can use the prepared FLA cover letter to do this.

If you want to use the FLA for educational materials, please check the appropriate box when submitting materials to the platform.