50
votes
Accepted
How to deal with contributors who write very bad quality code?
Define objective criteria that any contribution must fulfill. Automate checks for these criteria, using unit tests, linters, code coverage tools, …, then automatically run these checks for each PR as ...
- 39.4k
44
votes
Accepted
Is it legal for the author of an open source project to remove history of contributors' commits?
Nearly all free software licences require the preservation of existing copyright notices. If the author of a piece of GPLv3 software accepted your modified version, then since this code had to be ...
- 53k
42
votes
Accepted
Is it legal to have the "// (c) 2019 John Smith" header in all files when there are hundreds of contributors?
As far as I am aware, all FLOSS licenses that deal with copyright notices only require the preservation of notices that exist. Each author had the opportunity to add their own name to header when they ...
- 37.7k
33
votes
Accepted
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
what is the best way to go about being an active, influential FOSS contributor?
The two goals I bolded that you seem to be asking about are quite different.
Many open source projects start because ...
- 1,906
21
votes
What are the benefits of having a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) on OSS?
I would say that projects having a BDFL ultimately trust the vision of the project to one person, as opposed to design by committee.
You can refer to the list of BDFLs.
Many of the individuals listed ...
- 1,906
20
votes
Accepted
What are the benefits of having a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) on OSS?
I've always seen the BDFL model as halfway between a traditional open-source project structure and a traditional corporate project structure. You have the openness, transparency, and general culture ...
- 921
19
votes
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
Most FLOSS projects are a kind of meritocracy: those who contribute(d) a lot, they have a say. The well-known projects are not new projects and especially the maintainers often work on them for many ...
- 12k
17
votes
Contributing as a company
There are two issues here:
Managing copyright and licensing of the company's contributions in a legally rigorous way, including corporate agreement to the project's CLA, if any.
The use of a single ...
- 37.7k
17
votes
Implicit licensing when contributing to an open source project
In my understanding, my claims are completely baseless, because the moment I submitted the PR, I implicitly licensed my changes under MIT, because that is the license of the project. Is this the ...
- 33.4k
16
votes
Accepted
How to prevent contributors from claiming copyright on my LGPL-released software?
This is a legitimate issue that's come up various times in the past on various open source projects. The way it's typically handled is by not accepting external contributions into your repository ...
- 344
15
votes
Accepted
Do Contributors Own Copyright After Sending Contributions?
The common understanding is to consider that contributions are made under the same license as the project these are contributed to (unless stated otherwise).
On GitHub, this is made explicit in the ...
- 14.8k
15
votes
Accepted
Authors and contributors of forked project
Should I list myself as author, and original author as contributor? Or should I somehow refer to the company in general? Or it is legal to only mention myself here (and leave the reference to ...
- 53k
14
votes
How to prevent contributors from claiming copyright on my LGPL-released software?
We have run into this problem in libpng. We addressed it by putting any contributions that insist on keeping their own copyright, or are under a different open source license, into a "contrib" ...
- 3,931
14
votes
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
Be more of a team player. Comments like
There's always an "in" group that's running things about how the project works and aren't accepting of new ideas and innovations even if they are backed up ...
- 21.7k
13
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between contributor, member and collaborator?
Contributors
Git (in a git repository) identifies authors and committers by email address. Github users can associate email addresses with their accounts. When a user's set of email addresses is found ...
- 1,906
10
votes
Implicit licensing when contributing to an open source project
I rather thought this would be a duplicate question, but I can't currently find anything that fits exactly.
Outbound=inbound is a traditional custom and practice in the free-software community, but it'...
- 53k
9
votes
How do I (a beginner) find a bug in a project on Github?
The most useful open source contributions come from people who actually use the project they are contributing to. So I'd suggest to you first, to use free software as often as possible, and possibly ...
- 5,727
8
votes
Accepted
Method for accounting for non-code contributions?
I'm not aware of any hard metrics that can be used to automatically count non-code contributions (and I'm not sure there could be one) but I do know about projects that (1) survey contribution types ...
- 337
8
votes
How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?
I'm a maintainer in various projects in GitHub with ~50 million weekly downloads but I am one person and can only share what worked for me.
Persistence.
The number one mistake I see people get is ...
8
votes
Contributing as a company
The author of a work and the copyright holder of the work don't need to be the same entity.
An example of this is music - a song is written by an artist, but the copyright on it may be held by a ...
- 1,906
7
votes
Accepted
Open-source, when (not) to go on a crusade for a feature?
An open source project is more than a bunch of source code that anyone can download. It also includes an active community that works together to help make the project better for everyone that uses it. ...
- 1,525
7
votes
Accepted
Can a LGPL project use contributed code after the original contributor withdrew it and was banned from the project?
There doesn't seem to be a copyright violation here. The code was pretty clearly released under the LGPL, and open source licenses are (almost certainly) irrevocable; it doesn't matter that the patch ...
- 21.7k
7
votes
Accepted
How to approach being blocked from a repository you use and contributed to?
Forking is always an option in open source environments, and does not hurt. On platforms like GitHub it's actually the preferred way to create a pull request by uploading your own repository with the ...
- 12k
7
votes
How should I store contributor info ethically and practically?
It's good to have a thriving community.
I'd advocate option D: Maintain a detailed readme file in the repository with a credits section, or a separate credits section with the contributors nickname in ...
- 12k
7
votes
Apache 2.0 and patent grant to the code not related to the contribution
Does such a contribution give a license grant to the patent?
No.
The license grant is expressly limited to
those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their ...
- 739
6
votes
Accepted
Do I still own code I donated to GPL project?
It depends. Did you sign a Contributors License Agreement? These agreements usually clarify if the contributor keeps their copyright and just licenses the code to the project or if the contributor ...
- 12.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Where to find people interested in contributing to an open source project?
I think the question should be the other way around: How does people interested in Open Source development find you and your projects? My answer would be: be visible and provide easy ways to get ...
- 560
6
votes
Accepted
Finding the optimal number of collaborators for a project
In my experience, the best you can do is write down the direction and culture you want to develop/preserve in the project's community (values, goals, modes of operation, criteria for granting ...
- 337
6
votes
Accepted
How do you get someone to use or even contribute to your Open Source project?
The typical project life cycle:
build something that's useful, but buggy
people start using your software because it is useful
people are annoyed because your software is buggy, and is missing ...
- 39.4k
6
votes
Accepted
Transfer of MIT project to another repo/site
Firstly, let's clear up some terminology:
I have decided NOT to fork the project, but instead clone it and rebrand it and publish it under a different name.
The term "fork" generally means ...
- 178
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