# Legal-text provenance and primary sources

Checked: 5 November 2026. These sources support the license selection and publication procedure; they are not an independent legal review of ACES.

## Community Specification License 1.0

Joint Development Foundation, 2020.
https://github.com/CommunitySpecification/Community_Specification/blob/main/01-community-specification-license-v1.md

Retrieved upstream Git blob SHA: `49257e166be79a90f8364b4dfebd5bfecd713817`.
`LICENSE.md` preserves the exact 16,225 bytes of that blob, including CRLF line endings, attribution and the license-text CC-BY-4.0 notice. A change in line endings would change the hash without necessarily changing the terms; no such change was made in this package.

Relevant provisions: Section 1 (copyright/attribution), Sections 2-3 (patent grants, acceptance, withdrawal and exclusions), Section 4 (source-code licensing), Section 5 (no additional rights), Section 6 (competition), Section 8 (authority/disclaimers), and Section 9 (definitions, Scope and required portions).

Upstream implementation guide:
https://github.com/CommunitySpecification/Community_Specification/blob/main/getting-started.md

Upstream acceptance example and notices:
https://github.com/CommunitySpecification/Community_Specification/blob/main/00-contributor-license-agreement.md
https://github.com/CommunitySpecification/Community_Specification/blob/main/03-notices.md

The ACES membership, contributor agreement and governance policies are project-specific documents. They are not represented as unmodified upstream instruments. They do not alter the copied CSL. No upstream organization is represented as approving or endorsing ACES.

## Apache License 2.0

Apache Software Foundation, January 2004.
https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt

The complete standard license is reproduced in `LICENSES/Apache-2.0.txt`. The bundled copy was taken from the environment's standard `/usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0` text and checked against the published provisions. Its inclusion designates the specific ACES code elements listed in `LICENSING.md`; it does not relicense every file in the website repository.

## Public disclosure and publication evidence

European Patent Office, Guidelines for Examination, 2026, G-IV 7.5, Internet disclosures:
https://www.epo.org/en/legal/guidelines-epc/2026/g_iv_7_5.html

European Patent Office, Notice concerning internet citations, Official Journal 2009, page 456:
https://www.epo.org/en/legal/official-journal/2009/08-09/p456

These explain why public accessibility, content and the publication date matter, and why archival and version-history evidence can be useful. Their treatment is jurisdiction-specific; the package does not claim a universal rule that publication prevents every patent or guarantees enforceability.

## Scope of this work

The supplied ACES v0.2 technical text is preserved rather than independently revalidated. No patent landscape search, trademark clearance search, title investigation, contributor-authority audit or jurisdiction-specific enforceability opinion has been completed. The framework adoption, existing-member acceptance and initial contributor record are based on Reuven Farchi's direct written confirmation on 5 November 2026. Those records are not an independent investigation of rights. The policies are effective as stated; no professional legal review or guarantee of enforceability is represented.

## SPDX identification

Software Package Data Exchange, Community Specification License 1.0:
https://spdx.org/licenses/Community-Spec-1.0.html

The official short identifier is `Community-Spec-1.0`. The separate CC-BY-4.0 notice in the upstream text identifies the license of that legal text, not the designation for the ACES specification.