The "Contransus" (源译识) Translation Project, initiated by the OpenAtom Foundation, aims to build open source consensus via translation, in the hope of developing a widerly-shared open source ecosystem. This project is launched to promote better understanding of open source by offering professionally-reviewed, publicly available and community-oriented translations of various open source resources, primarily into Chinese. The project focuses on not only the translation of open-source licenses, but also of open-source-related judgments, books, key reports, etc.
Through the Project Repository, you are warmly welcome to participate in the Contransus Project by using approved translations, filing your translation, sharing your opinion on any translation texts, as well as recommending useful resources and experts in open source domain. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to contact us via legal[at]openatom.org.
The reason why we initiated the open-source licenses section (this “Section”) is that while most open source licenses are only available in English and even in professional legal language, native Chinese developers continue to meet the language barrier in understanding and using open source licenses properly. Aiming to provide a permanent and reliable Chinese translation of open-source licenses that is accessible to everyone, this Section is open to the community for contributions and discussions.
We established a Review Panel of experts in regard to both open source and languages, including Professor ZHOU Minghui (CS professor of Peking University, leading the OSI-approved Mulan PSLv2, etc.), WEI Sir (translator of the Cathedral and the Bazaar and various OS licenses), SHEN Fen (top open source legal counsel from Huawei and a recognized legal expert in OS community), Professor SONG Lei (the chief editor of the English-Chinese Dictionary of Law Terms), and Professor XU Meiling (assistant professor on intellectual property law from UIBE). The panel has been working collaboratively in reviewing and revising candidate translation texts line by line to develop a finalized version of translation.
The experts will organise the review meeting(s) for the License of which there are at least three translations submitted. The panel votes to a candidate translation text first, reviews and revises it line by line then. After publishing in the community for at least one month and incorporating any changes after feedback (you can do this from the Issue or directly email to [email protected]) or enquires made to the steward(s) of the OS license, the revised text becomes the finalized text shared under CC0. Although the review meetings are NOT open to the public, we publish the minutes to reflect all our discussions and explanations, as well as to follow up on the enquiries.
We also set up a review roadmap to further the translation. We encourage you to adjust your submission timeline in accordance with this review plan.
- 2023 Q1-Q2：permissive licenses
- 2023 Q3-Q4：copyleft licenses
- 2024 Q1-Q2：specificial purposes licenses
- 2024 Q3-Q4：special jurisdiction and minority language licenses.
Currently, the experts have reviewed the following open source license translations and made them publicly available:
Open-source license currently quasi finished its review includes:
- GNU GPL V3
(1)You can submit your translation(s) files in MarkDown (preferred), txt or Word format to the Submission folder (In general, fork this repo, then pull requests) or directly send them to [email protected].
(2)Please use the following format to name your file: [SDPX License Abbreviation] Translation - [Your Name] - [Date of Submission/YYYYMMDD].
(3)Along with your submission, please kindly include a Statement of Contribution: I, [Your Name], hereby declare that this translation is my original work. If it is selected by the Contransus Translation Program as a candidate version to be reviewed and finalized, I agree to allow OpenAtom to share it in the public domain under the Creative Commons Zero License (CC0). The submissions will NOT be deemed valid unless such Statement is included.
With reference to the OSI license list and SPDX license list, we set up the following four categories of submissions, which will be updated from time to time when there may be new submissions, and there may be some overlap between the categories. *Licenses marked with an asterisk are usually not certified by OSI or FSF, so please use them with caution.
(Content inside the brackets is the abbreviation for SDPX licenses.)
Category 1: popular and widely-used or with strong communities
1.[Apache 2.0] Apache License 2.0
2.[BSD-3-Clause] 3-clause BSD license
3.[BSD-2-Clause] 2-clause BSD license
4.[MIT] MIT license
5.[GPL-2.0] GNU General Public License version 2
6.[GPL-3.0] GNU General Public License version 3
7.[LGPL-3.0] GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3
8.[MPL-2.0] Mozilla Public License 2.0
9.[EPL-2.0] Eclipse Public License 2.0
10.[CDDL-1.0] Common Development and Distribution License 1.0
Category 2: special purposes licenses.
11.[BSD-2-Clause-Patent] BSD-2 Clause Plus Patent License Patent
12.[ECL-2.0] Educational Community License, Version 2.0
13.[IPA] IPA Font License
14.[BSD-3-Clause-LBNL] Lawrence Berkeley National Labs BSD Variant License
15.[NASA-1.3] NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3
16.[OSET-PL-2.1] OSET Public License version 2.1
17.[OFL-1.1] SIL Open Font License 1.1
18.[Unicode-DFS-2016] Unicode License Agreement - Data Files and Software
19.[Unlicense] The Unlicense
20.[UCL-1.0] Upstream Compatibility License v1.0
21.[CC0 1.0] Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal、[CC-BY-SA-4.0] Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License、[CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0] Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International、[CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0] Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International
22.[CERN-OHL-P-2.0] CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Permissive
23.[CERN-OHL-W-2.0] CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Weakly Reciprocal
24.[CERN-OHL-S-2.0] CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal
25.[CDLA-Permissive-2.0] Community Data License Agreement Permissive 2.0
26.*[C-UDA-1.0] Computational Use of Data Agreement v1.0
and other special purposes licenses
Category 3: special jurisdiction and minority language licenses
27.[CeCILL-2.1] CeCILL Free Software License Agreement v2.1
28.[LiLiQ-P-1.1] Licence Libre du Québec – Permissive version 1.1
29.[IPA] IPA Font License
30.[EUPL-1.2] European Union Public License 1.2
31.*[공공누리] 공공저작물 자유이용 허락 표시제도 / Korea Open Government License (KOGL)
32.*[LAL-1.3] Licence Art Libre 1.3
33.*[D-FSL-1.0] Deutsche Freie Software Lizenz
34.*[CC-BY-SA-2.1-JP] Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.1 Japan
and other special jurisdiction and minority language licenses
Category 4: any other licenses
35.[0BSD] BSD Zero Clause License
36.[AGPL-3.0] GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
37.[Apache-1.1] Apache License 1.1
38.[BSD-1-clause] BSD-1-clause
39.[GFDL-1.3] GNU Free Documentation License v1.3
40.[ISC] ISC License
and other licenses not mentioned above.
We extend our sincere gratitude to 12 translators: Lotus、Vanessa、Peaksol、野行僧、迷糊、赵振华、Sikkim、Sara、OliviaCat、欧轩琦、KUMA、Leo (listed by order of first submission).
The final versions of license translation will be published on the official website and the WeChat platform of OpenAtom, and will also be recommended to open source organizations such as Apache Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation and the Open Source Initiative (OSI), etc.