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Community Specification license and repository governance

Document status: verified. Canonical source.

Summary

Community Specification 1.0 provides repository-based legal and governance terms for collaborative specification development. Its contributor agreement, scope, notices and license files define participation, patent coverage and source-code licensing. The process recommends separate repositories for a specification and its reference source code where practical.

Evidence

  • The contributor license agreement binds participants to the legal and governance terms of the working group. Locator: getting-started.md, lines 199–200, retrieved 2026-08-30.
  • Scope.md defines the working group’s subject matter and bounds the patent licensing obligations. Locator: getting-started.md, lines 201 and 209, retrieved 2026-08-30.
  • Notices.md records contacts, patent exclusions, implementers and withdrawn participants. License.md identifies the specification license and the separate license for source or sample code. Locator: getting-started.md, lines 203–213, retrieved 2026-08-30.
  • The best-practice section recommends a contributor-agreement check, use of the specification license for specifications rather than code, careful scope definition and separate specification and code repositories. Locator: getting-started.md, lines 235–245, retrieved 2026-08-30.

Mechanism

Each contributor accepts the common agreement before a contribution is merged. The declared scope bounds patent commitments. Notices record exclusions and implementer assertions. The specification license grants rights applicable to independent implementations, while an Open Source Initiative-approved license continues to govern implementation code.

NUIF relevance

Borrow the explicit scope, notices and contributor-agreement model before a multi-party specification is published as an implementable draft.

Adapt the separate-repository recommendation only when the specification has independent contributors. The current monorepository keeps experiments, fixtures and draft modules reviewable at the same revision.

Reject applying Community Specification terms retroactively without legal review and contributor consent. The current code licenses do not establish the specification-wide patent commitments described by this process.

Open questions

  • The entity that would administer contributor agreements and notices has not been selected.
  • The patent scope requires legal review after the implementable draft boundary is stable.