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.