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choosealicense.com/CONTRIBUTING.md
Mike Linksvayer b721ecba5b word for better reading
2017-05-30 14:24:57 -07:00

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How to Contribute

We love Pull Requests! Your contributions help make ChooseALicense.com great.

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

Getting Started

So you want to contribute to ChooseALicense. Great! We welcome any help we can get. But first, please make sure you understand what this site is all about. It’s not a comprehensive list of all possible licenses.

Adding a license

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 http://choosealicense.com/licenses, and there are several requirements for a license to be cataloged on the site:

  1. The license must have an SPDX identifier. If your license isn't registered with SPDX, please request that it be added.
  2. The license must be listed on one of the following approved lists of licenses:
  3. A GitHub code search must reveal at least 1,000 public repositories using the license
  4. Identification of 3 notable projects using the license with straightforward LICENSE files which serve as examples newcomers can follow and that could be detected by licensee if it knew about the license

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:

  • Is the license already cataloged? See http://choosealicense.com/appendix/ for a list of all of the licenses known by the site.
  • Licenses live in the /_licenses folder.
  • The license files should be in the format of _licenses/[lowercased-spdx-id].txt (e.g., _licenses/mit.txt)
  • Each license has both required and optional metadata that should be included.
  • The text of the license should be wrapped to a 78 character width.
  • The text of the license should match the corresponding text found at https://spdx.org/licenses/
  • The body of the file should be the text of the license in plain text.

Making Changes

The easiest way to make a change is to simply edit a file from your browser. When you click the edit button, it will fork the repository under your account. Note what issue/issues your patch fixes in the commit message.

For example, to change this file, find it in the GitHub repository. Then click the Edit button. Make your changes, type in a commit message, and click the Propose File Change button. That’s it!

You will be asked to sign the GitHub Contributor License Agreement for this project when you make your first pull request.

For more advanced changes, check out the bootstrap instructions in the project's readme.

Testing

HTML::Proofer is set up to validate all links within the project. You can run this locally to ensure that your changes are valid:

./script/bootstrap
./script/cibuild