58 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
58 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
# How to contribute
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We love Pull Requests! Your contributions help make ChooseALicense.com great.
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Contributions to this project are [released](https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#6-contributions-under-repository-license) to the public under the [project's open source license](LICENSE.md).
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Please note that this project is released with a [Contributor Code of Conduct](CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md). By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
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## Getting started
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So you want to contribute to ChooseALicense. Great! We welcome any help we can
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get. But first, please make sure you understand what
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[this site is all about](https://choosealicense.com/about). It’s not a comprehensive list of all possible licenses.
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## Adding a license
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Choosealicense.com is intended to demystify license choices, not present or catalog all of them. As such, only a small number are highlighted on the home page or <https://choosealicense.com/licenses>, and there are several requirements for a license to be [cataloged](https://choosealicense.com/appendix/) on the site:
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1. The license must have [an SPDX identifier](https://spdx.org/licenses/). If your license isn't registered with SPDX, please [request that it be added](https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md).
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2. The license must be listed on one of the following approved lists of licenses:
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* [List of OSI approved licenses](https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical)
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* [GNU's list of free licenses](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html) (*note: the license must be listed in one of the three "free" categories*)
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* [Open Definition's list of conformant licenses](https://opendefinition.org/licenses/) (non-code)
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3. The license must be used in at least *1,000* public repositories. This may be documented, for example, with a [GitHub code search](https://github.com/search?q=MIT+path%3ALICENSE&type=Code).
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4. 3 notable projects using the license must be identified. These must have straightforward LICENSE files which serve as examples newcomers can follow and that could be detected by [licensee](https://github.com/licensee/licensee) if it knew about the license.
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If your proposed license meets the above criteria, here's a few other things to keep in mind as you propose the license's addition:
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* Is the license already cataloged? See <https://choosealicense.com/appendix/> for a list of all of the licenses known by the site.
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* Licenses live in the `/_licenses` folder.
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* The license files should be in the format of `_licenses/[lowercased-spdx-id].txt` (e.g., `_licenses/mit.txt`)
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* Each license has both [required and optional metadata](https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com#license-metadata) that should be included.
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* The text of the license should be wrapped to a 78 character width.
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* The text of the license should match the corresponding text found in [spdx/license-list-data](https://github.com/spdx/license-list-data/blob/master/text/). If there are errors there, please fix them in [spdx/license-list-XML](https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML) (from which the plain text version is generated) so as to minimize license text variation and make it easier for choosealicense.com to eventually consume license texts directly from SPDX.
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* The body of the file should be the text of the license in plain text.
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## Making changes
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The easiest way to make a change is to simply edit a file from your browser.
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When you click the edit button, it will fork the repository under your account.
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Note what issue/issues your patch fixes in the commit message.
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For example, to [change this file](/CONTRIBUTING.md),
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find it in the GitHub repository. Then click the `Edit` button. Make your
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changes, type in a commit message, and click the `Propose File Change` button.
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That’s it!
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For more advanced changes, check out [the bootstrap instructions](https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com#run-it-on-your-machine) in the [project's readme](/README.md).
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## Testing
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[HTML::Proofer](https://github.com/gjtorikian/html-proofer) is set up to validate all links within the project. You can run this locally to ensure that your changes are valid:
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```shell
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./script/bootstrap
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./script/cibuild
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```
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