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                    JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 3RD SEPTEMBER, 2017
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Contributing to WolfMUD
   DATE: Sun  3 Sep 17:50:45 BST 2017

Due to my ongoing work with Mikołaj I’ve had to make a decision related to
contributor license agreements (CLA) and how I am going to accept patches and
work from other people for WolfMUD.

I could have used a complex CLA full of legalese with the intent of protecting
my own arse. However I really want to encourage submissions and I feel a lot
of legalese will only put people off. To this end, after some researching, I
have instead adopted a policy called “inbound=outbound”. Basically this simply
means that contributions to WolfMUD need to be under the same license as
WolfMUD — which is the BSD 2 clause license. In addition people need to
certify their work according to the Developer’s Certificate of Origin:


                       Developer’s Certificate of Origin 1.1

  By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:

    (a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
        have the right to submit it under the open source license
        indicated in the file; or

    (b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
        of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
        license and I have the right under that license to submit that
        work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
        by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
        permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
        in the file; or

    (c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
        person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
        it.

    (d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
        are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
        personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
        maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
        this project or the open source license(s) involved.


A commit to the public dev branch adds a CONTRIBUTING file and a copy of the
Developer’s Certificate of Origin. There is also a CONTRIBUTORS file for
recording and giving credit to people who have made contributions.

What does this actually mean for people submitting work to WolfMUD?

If you are using git, agree to the licensing and can certify your work simply
indicate your acceptance with a sign-off line for each of your commits. For
example:


  Signed-off-by: Andrew 'Diddymus' Rolfe <diddymus@wolfmud.org>


This seems to be the simplest process possible.

What if you are not using git? There are a number of options. You can email
your work making sure the email body contains a description of your changes
and a sign off line. You can then attach plain patches or files to the email
and I’ll try my best to create commits for the project based on your
submission with your details, description and sign-off.

I hope that my decision is the right one, but if anyone has objections or
comments please let me know: diddymus@wolfmud.org

--
Diddymus


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