---
title: Licensing
---

# Licensing

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version. Please see the
[LICENSE](https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/blob/master/LICENSE.md) file
in our repository for the full text.

Like many open source projects, we require that contributors provide us with a
Contributor License Agreement (CLA). By submitting code to the DEV project, you
are granting us a right to use that code under the terms of the CLA.

Our version of the CLA was adapted from the Microsoft Contributor License
Agreement, which they generously made available to the public domain under
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

## Where can I learn more about the AGPL-3 license?

Please refer to the official “[Why the Affero
GPL](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html)” and the [FAQ
page](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html) on
[GNU.org](https://www.gnu.org) for full details regarding this license.

## Why does DEV have a CLA?

The Contributor License Agreement (CLA) is a legal document in which you state
that you are entitled to contribute your code to the DEV codebase, and are
willing to have it used in distributions and derivative work.

The CLA helps provide confidence to future users that they will be allowed to
use the DEV codebase without fear that a contributor will try to withdraw
permissions at a later date.

## Am I giving away the copyright of my contributions?

No. You are granting DEV a license to use and distribute your contribution
without further restriction, not assigning the copyright.

## What if I have other questions?

Please check out our main repository or send an email to
[yo@dev.to](mailto:yo@dev.to).
