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The Unicode Consortium’s mission is to enable people around the world to use computers in any language. Our freely available standards, specifications, software, and data form the foundation for software internationalization in all major operating systems, browsers, search engines, applications, and the World Wide Web.
In support of this mission, the Consortium has adopted terms of use and outbound open source licenses that are intended to make the Consortium’s standards, specifications, documentation, data, and software as widely and freely available as reasonably possible while protecting the integrity of these products.
All Consortium standards, specifications, documentation, data, and software are subject to the Unicode Terms of Use. The Unicode® Standard Core Specification, Unicode Technical Reports, Unicode Code Charts, and many other materials are generally made freely available for personal and internal business use while being subject to certain restrictions on modification and public distribution, as set forth in further detail in the Unicode Terms of Use and the legal notices carried by these publications.
The Consortium’s software and data files are generally licensed under the OSI-approved Unicode License v3, a free, open source, highly permissive license based on the MIT License. The primary difference between the MIT License and the Unicode License is that the Unicode License expressly covers data and data files. The Unicode License v3 and its predecessors have been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) since 2015.
The Unicode Consortium’s intellectual property and technical contribution policies are informed by the Consortium’s mission and its commitment to making the Consortium’s standards, specifications, data, and software as widely and freely available as reasonably possible.
Accordingly, the Consortium requires contributors to its standards, specifications, data, and software to license (or in some cases assign) to the Consortium any intellectual property rights they may have in their contributions, so as to allow the Consortium to make those contributions freely available under the Unicode Terms of Use and/or the Unicode License, as appropriate. The Consortium has several different policies and standard agreements under which contributions and submissions are made, as set forth in further detail below. In addition to our standard contribution and submission agreements, certain contributions may be made under other custom agreements, depending on the nature of the contribution and other circumstances.
Contributors to our large data and software projects, e.g., CLDR, ICU, ICU4X, and associated sub-projects, are generally required to contribute under a contributor license agreement (CLA). We also require a CLA for contributions and submissions to the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) of specifications, algorithms, and documentation, and any changes or updates thereto.
The Unicode CLAs are license agreements that ensure that a contributor retains ownership of any intellectual property rights in their contribution while granting the Unicode Consortium the necessary legal rights to use and redistribute that contribution in the various Consortium products.
The latest and current Unicode CLAs are based on the Apache Software Foundation's CLAs, which are well-known in the industry and widely adopted by many respected open source projects. The primary difference between the Apache CLAs and the Unicode CLAs is that the Unicode CLAs explicitly cover contributions of standards, specifications, and data as well as software.
There are two versions of the CLA, the Unicode Corporate CLA and the Unicode Individual CLA. Which version needs to be signed depends on who owns the contribution being made: the individual making the contribution or the contributor’s employer. It is the contributor's responsibility to know (or determine) whether or not their contribution is or may be owned by their employer.
(For further guidance on how to sign a Unicode CLA, please refer to the section below regarding How to Sign a Unicode CLA.)
Those who submit a proposal for a new emoji do so in accordance with the Guidelines for Submitting Emoji Proposals and pursuant to the Unicode Emoji Proposal Agreement & License, which grants to the Consortium a broad license to any intellectual property rights in the proposed emoji.
Those who contribute a font for characters to be encoded or a font otherwise intended to be used in a publication of the Unicode Consortium do so under the Unicode Font Submission Policy and pursuant to a Grant of Font License.
In the absence of a signed CLA or other agreement with the Consortium that expressly governs particular contributions or submissions, the act of making a contribution or submission of any kind to the Consortium by any communication channel constitutes a binding legal agreement by the contributor or submitter that they:
If you wish to contribute to one or more of the Unicode Consortium’s data and software projects managed in GitHub, CLDR, ICU, or ICU4X, you will need to sign a Unicode CLA. This can usually be done directly in the Unicode GitHub repositories following the instructions found there, namely by opening a Pull Request or going directly to the Unicode CLA Form in GitHub. If you wish to make submissions to the UTC of specifications, algorithms, and/or associated documentation, or any proposed modifications thereto, a CLA is required. To start this process, please email member-services@unicode.org.
There are two versions of the Unicode CLA, the Unicode Corporate CLA and the Unicode Individual CLA. Which version needs to be signed depends on who owns the contribution being made, the individual making the contribution or the contributor’s employer. It is the contributor's responsibility to know (or determine) whether or not their contribution is or may be owned by their employer.
The Unicode Corporate CLA should be signed by your employer if you are not self-employed but rather employed by a company that does or may have rights in your contributions. In many jurisdictions/situations, employers retain intellectual property rights for works produced by their employees. Thus, it is important that your employer sign the Corporate CLA to ensure that Unicode has the appropriate permissions to use your contribution. To check if your employer has already signed the Unicode Corporate CLA, please refer to this list of corporate signatories or contact member-services@unicode.org.
You should sign the Unicode Individual CLA if you are an individual who is unemployed or self-employed, e.g., a sole proprietor or you have your own business.
If you are unsure which CLA to sign, please first discuss this question with your employer to determine whether your employer has rights in your contributions and consents to your making contributions to the Unicode Consortium. Your manager and/or your company’s open source compliance or legal department should be able to advise you as to the steps required by your company. This is your legal responsibility and it is important to protect you, your employer, and the Unicode Consortium. If you have further questions, please contact member-services@unicode.org.
If you are signing an Individual CLA or are covered by your employer’s Corporate CLA, you can use the Unicode CLA Form in GitHub to sign the CLA. If a Corporate CLA is needed and your employer is not on this list of corporate signatories, then you cannot sign the CLA in GitHub. You will need to arrange for your employer to sign the Corporate CLA by contacting member-services@unicode.org. The Corporate CLA must be signed by someone with signing authority for the corporation (typically a director, vice president, or higher), and must also be reviewed by the Unicode Consortium legal counsel. Therefore, corporate CLAs may take some time to process and you will have to wait until the Corporate CLA is signed before contributing.
If a contributor has been contributing under a Corporate CLA but then changes employment status, they will need to stop contributing until a new CLA is signed covering their contributions under the new employment status. If this describes your situation, you should first notify Unicode immediately with the date your employment ends so you can be deleted from your prior CLA. If you wish to continue contributing you will need to put a new CLA in place. If you have become unemployed or self-employed you should personally sign the Individual CLA. If you have a new employer, you will need to ensure that your new employer has signed the Corporate CLA and that you are covered by it. To start this process, email member-services@unicode.org.
