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Technical Team/Use Cases/2.0/Application which ships with a contrib libraries

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  1. Title: Application which ships with a contrib libraries
  2. Primary Actor: Committer of the open source project containing the contrib library
  3. Goal in Context: To include within the distribution of an open source project contributions made by non-project members.  These contributions are by default not built into the resultant binaries (assuming there are build scripts included in the distribution).  There can be no dependency from the main project on the contrib code.  The contrib libraries may contain licenses different from the main open source project.
  4. Stakeholders and Interests:
    1. Committers to the open source project:
      1. Isolates the contrib copyrighted artifacts so that any copyleft licenses will not impact the overall licensing of the project (including the project committers copyrighted works).
    2. Contributors to the contrib library:
      1. Allow the contributors to make their contributions available under the license of their choice
    3. Consumers of upstream copyrightable artifacts:
      1. To receive accurate and clear information of licensing of artifacts
      2. To be able to distinguish copyrighted artifacts intended for be build and distributed as part of the project from optional copyrighted artifacts which may or may not be included
      3. To be able to subset, extend, or aggregate artifacts and pass on clear authoritative verifiable license for the resulting new copyrightable artifacts.
  5. Preconditions:
    1. Project has been organized with clear distinctions between the contrib and main project artifacts
    2. Licensing information has been collected for the contrib and main project artifacts
  6. Main Success Scenario: Committer provides complete licensing information and an indication of which artifacts are part of the main project and which artifacts are part of a contrib library.  Each contrib library will contain information on licensing.
  7. Failed End Condition: Committer does not specify an artifact is part of a contrib library causing confusion on the applicable license for the overall project.
  8. Trigger:
    1. Project release
    2. Contrib updates
  9. Notes:  This use case is from the perspective of a committer who is assembling/aggregating additional contributed code for further distribution.  The downstream recipient of the package may choose to use one of the contrib items as part of their delivery could alter the licensing for the aggregated work product.  The downstream recipient could also remove the contrib artifacts completely.
  10. Example: Postgresql, which ships under a BSD license overall, contains a contrib/ directory that contains GPL licensed code.