Add new contributing FAQ announcing acceptance of corporate (C).

Autobuild-User: Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>
Autobuild-Date: Wed Oct 12 03:46:41 CEST 2011 on sn-devel-104

1 files changed, 120 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/README.contributing b/README.contributing
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+How to contribute a patch to Samba
+----------------------------------
+
+Simple, just make the code change, and email it as either a "diff -u"
+change, or as a "git format-patch" change against the original source
+code to samba-technical@samba.org, or attach it to a bug report at
+http://bugzilla.samba.org
+
+For larger code changes, breaking the changes up into a set of simple
+patches, each of which does a single thing, are much easier to review.
+Patch sets like that will most likely have an easier time being merged
+into the Samba code than large single patches that make lots of
+changes in one large diff.
+
+Ownership of the contributed code
+---------------------------------
+
+Samba is a project with distributed copyright ownership, which means
+we prefer the copyright on parts of Samba to be held by individuals
+rather than corporations if possible. There are historical legal
+reasons for this, but one of the best ways to explain it is that it's
+much easier to work with individuals who have ownership than corporate
+legal departments if we ever need to make reasonable compromises with
+people using and working with Samba.
+
+We track the ownership of every part of Samba via git, our source code
+control system, so we know the provenance of every piece of code that
+is committed to Samba.
+
+So if possible, if you're doing Samba changes on behalf of a company
+who normally owns all the work you do please get them to assign
+personal copyright ownership of your changes to you as an individual,
+that makes things very easy for us to work with and avoids bringing
+corporate legal departments into the picture.
+
+If you can't do this we can still accept patches from you owned by
+your employer under a standard employment contract with corporate
+copyright ownership. It just requires a simple set-up process first.
+
+We use a process very similar to the way things are done in the Linux
+kernel community, so it should be very easy to get a sign off from
+your corporate legal department. The only changes we've made are to
+accommodate the licenses we use, which are GPLv3 and LGPLv3 (or later)
+whereas the Linux kernel uses GPLv2.
+
+The process is called signing.
+
+How to sign your work
+---------------------
+
+Once you have permission to contribute to Samba from
+your employer, simply email a copy of the following text
+from your corporate email address to contributing@samba.org
+
+------------------------------------------------------------
+Samba Developer's Certificate of Origin. Version 1.0
+
+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 appropriate
+    version of the GNU General Public License; 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 GNU General Public License, in the
+    appropriate version; or
+
+(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
+    person who certified (a) or (b) 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 metadata and personal
+    information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
+    maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed
+    consistent with the Samba Team's policies and the
+    requirements of the GNU GPL where they are relevant.
+
+(e) I am granting this work to this project under the terms of both
+    the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public
+    License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version
+    3 of these Licenses, or (at the option of the project) any later
+    version.
+
+    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
+    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html
+------------------------------------------------------------
+
+We will maintain a copy of that email as a record that you have the
+rights to contribute code to Samba under the required licenses whilst
+working for the company where the email came from.
+
+Then when sending in a patch via the normal mechanisms described
+above, add a line that states:
+
+Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.example.org>
+
+using your real name and the email address you sent the original email
+you used to send the Samba Developer's Certificate of Origin to us
+(sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.)
+
+That's it ! Such code can then quite happily contain changes that have
+copyright messages such as :
+
+        (C) Example Corporation.
+
+and can be merged into the Samba codebase in the same way as patches
+from any other individual. You don't need to send in a copy of the
+Samba Developer's Certificate of Origin for each patch, or inside each
+patch. Just the sign-off message is all that is required once we've
+received the initial email.
+
+Have fun and happy Samba hacking !
+
+The Samba Team.
+