Legal#

This page details GNOME’s legal guidelines and requirements for development projects.

Licensing#

As an open source project, GNOME requires that all its modules be licensed using an OSI approved license (see the SPDX license list for reference). This includes repositories of assets and resources, as well as code.

The primary licenses used in GNOME are:

GNU General Public License, versions 2 and 3
GNU Lesser Public License, version 2
Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CCBYSA)

Each module’s license should be included in its COPYING file.

Copyright Notices#

While they are not strictly necessary, it is recommended that source code files include a copyright notice.

Some guidelines:

Existing copyright notices should not be removed
Avoid copyright notices for individual contributors, since this can lead to maintenance overhead
For new files, the following copyright notice is recommended: Copyright the <Module Name> authors
If you decide to add the year to a copyright notice, do not update it every year

For more information, see this article.

Formatting#

We recommend following the REUSE guidelines for expressing licensing terms and copyright inside a project:

Record the licensing terms using the SPDX-License-Identifier tag with a valid SPDX license identifier
Record the copyright holder using one or more SPDX-FileCopyrightText tags

For instance:

/* your-project-file.c
 *
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1-or-later
 * SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2024 Your Name
 * SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2025 Another Contributor
 */

Or:

# your-project-file.py
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2025 Your Name

For more information, see the REUSE tutorial.