Howto: Contribute to Gramps

From Gramps
Revision as of 20:10, 13 April 2023 by Nick H (talk | contribs) (Clarify that code generated by an AI is not allowed in contributions)
Jump to: navigation, search

How can I contribute to Gramps?

There are a variety ways in which one can contribute to Gramps, but there a few constraints that Gramps (or any open source project) must ensure to protect the project. This page discusses these issues.

GNU General Public License

Gramps is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2 or later.

A brief statement appears at the top of every Python file in Gramps:

# Copyright (C) YEAR  YOUR-NAME-HERE <CONTACT-EMAIL>
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301  USA

To contribute to Gramps you must:

  1. Hold the copyright to your code and license it under GPLv2 or later (see 1)
  2. Add your real name and contact information at the top of any file for which you have contributed
  3. Certify that you personally authored the code and did not copy from other implementations or use AI generators

If you have viewed proprietary source code that performs the same, or similar function to a part of Gramps, then you cannot contribute related code. For more information, please (see 3)

See also

References

  1. OSS Watch - Can you contribute code to an open source project?
  2. The GNU General Public License - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
  3. 3.2 Can I look at source code distributed with other implementations to get inspiration? - GNU Classpath FAQ - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
  4. GitHub Terms & Conditions - 6. Contributions Under Repository License