April 7, 2020
Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected. It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment.
We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease.
We will implement this pledge through a license that details the terms and conditions under which our intellectual property is made available.
How to make the Pledge
The first step for organizations wishing to make the Pledge is to publicly commit to making intellectual property relevant to COVID-19 freely available, by:
- Posting a public statement that the organization is making the Pledge, on their website.
- Issuing an official press release.
And then sending us a link to this statement, a point of contact in the organization, and, at the organization’s discretion, a copy of their logo to display on this site.
How to implement the Pledge
The next step for organizations who have made the Pledge is to implement it via a license detailing the terms and conditions under which their intellectual property is made available. There are three options for doing so:
- Adopt an Open COVID License (OCL), created by our legal team for organizations that wish to implement the Pledge simply and immediately on terms shared by many other organizations.
- Adopt an Open COVID Compatible License.
- Adopt an Open COVID Alternative License.
An Open COVID License is one that we pre-prepared and is consistent with the Open COVID Pledge. An Open COVID Compatible License has been either pre-determined by us as being compatible with the OCL or includes basic permissions in common with the OCL. An Open COVID Alternative License is compatible with the Open COVID Pledge but not with the other two categories of licenses. Read more about license compatibility.
Send us links to your license or licenses, a point of contact in the organization, and, at the organization’s discretion, a copy of their logo to display on this site.