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You and other contributors are part of the growing OpenMRS community. We work together to share ideas, software, documentation, bug fixes, development tools, project management resources, and anything else of value that you contribute to create successful implementations of electronic medical record systems and other health resources for the world. We share credit with our contributors for our success.
Our Contribution Policy is simple: Voluntary contributions are gratefully accepted as long as the OpenMRS community and all downstream users are allowed to use those contributions for our public benefit mission.
There are many kinds of contributions we invite you to make for this cause:
OpenMRS accepts intellectual property contributions of many kinds and then collects them into OpenMRS software distributions that are licensed to the public under the open source Mozilla Public License 2.0 with Healthcare Disclaimer (MPL 2.0 HD). Non-code contributions such as documentation, images, or other creative works are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The details around intellectual property contributions in particular are often tricky to understand. As described more fully below, OpenMRS project teams review all software contributions to ensure that open source licenses for the contributions are compatible with the MPL 2.0 HD license.
If you have questions about any aspect of the OpenMRS Contribution Policy, please contact community@openmrs.org.
Software includes both functional and expressive works, and it sometimes arrives encumbered with many varieties of legal interests that can be owned, licensed, monopolized or sold, or limited for its use in derivative or advanced software,The OpenMRS project collects such contributed software into larger packages that we distribute as collective works under the MPL 2.0 HD license. To do so, we must ensure that the open source licenses applying to those contributions are compatible with MPL 2.0 HD and that there are no intellectual property encumbrances that would prevent the use of our collective software for health care delivery worldwide.
As is described in the OpenMRS Copyright and DMCA Policy, we respect all copyrights and copyright licenses.
To ensure licensing consistency, we take steps to determine that contributions of intellectual property are not encumbered. These are the steps:
The NOTICE file that accompanies every formal distribution of software by an OpenMRS project identifies each third-party component in that software and the open source or Creative Commons license under which that component is available to the public. The following information, if available, will also be included in the NOTICE file:
OpenMRS relies on the recommendations of Open Source Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, and Creative Commons to determine which free and open source licenses are compatible with the Mozilla Public License 2.0 with Healthcare Disclaimer (MPL 2.0 HD) under which OpenMRS distributes software and documentation.
Some of those licenses may not be compatible with the license requirements of some commercial companies. That is another purpose for the NOTICE file that OpenMRS projects provide with each software distribution. Each downstream modifier and/or distributor of OpenMRS software and documentation is responsible for making such license compatibility determinations for itself.
Rest assured that OpenMRS software and documentation can be used for free by everyone in the world under the open source MPL 2.0 HD license.