OpenbravoPOS Contributor's Guide
Introduction
Thanks for taking the time and effort to consider helping the Openbravo POS open source project. There are many ways that you can help to make Openbravo a better product. Here are some areas were you can help - if you have more ideas for how to improve Openbravo feel free to post them publicly in our Open Discussion forum or send us a message to Adrian Romero <adrian.romero at openbravo.com>.
Legal aspects
Openbravo S.L requires any contributor to the core of the Openbravo projects to sign our contributor's agreement and send it by regular mail or by fax to Openbravo (this is an unfortunate consequence of copyright law in some jurisdictions). This requirement does not apply to external modules, localizations, documentation, except if they are contributed to us. It only applies to contributions that will be part of the core product.
The objective of contributor agreement is to protect the integrity of the project, its users and developers. The contributor agreement transfers the contributor's copyright to Openbravo who grants a non-exclusive license back to allow the contributor to use his/her own work. The rationale behind the agreement is:
- In case of a legal claim, having a single copyright owner makes more easy to defend the interests of the Openbravo users and developers. Openbravo is committed to defend Openbravo projects in the event of any claim or infringement by third parties.
- Openbravo S.L can relicense its works under any other license in the future. When starting an open source project, the choice of license is intended to be permanent, but the experience of the past few years is that the ability to relicense a project is a useful tool in meeting challenges for open source projects. Not having that flexibility may be a drawback. Without the agreement, every single contributor must be contacted and unanimity reached in order to relicense a code base, or parts of the code must be reimplemented. This is true for all but the most permissively-licensed open source projects.
- The contributors assert that their contributions are original and not protected by any patents. It guarantees to all contributors in the project that all the contributions are original.
Contributor's agreements are standard procedure in open source projects followed by projects ranging from the Free Software Foundation to the OpenOffice.org project, including the Apache project, on which this agreement is loosely based.
If you are not contributing code within the framework of a company or an institution, (i.e. your work is done as an individual), you have just to sign the contribution agreement and send it to Openbravo S.L.
If you are a company or your company is an Openbravo Partner, your company may well have already signed the agreement. Please, check with your manager or you can check this with us too.
If your company is not an Openbravo Partner, please ensure that someone authorised to sign on behalf of the company signs the agreement and lists the names of people that agreements covers. This is usually done by a senior manager in the organization. This helps to reduce the number of individuals agreements to be signed.
Openbravo has a policy of not negotiating alternative Contributor Agreements. This protects everyone equally, with the goal that no contributor gets special treatment to the detriment of other participants. If the terms of the agreement are not acceptable to you or your company, we can discuss an alternative commercial arrangement.
If you have any question regarding this contract please contact us legal@openbravo.com
Help others to install and implement Openbravo POS
Do you have experience installing, configuring or using Openbravo POS? Many people download, install, configure and deploy Openbravo every day. Help them by answering their questions at Openbravo forums at SourceForge. Share your knowledge and experiences with others and learn from the Openbravo community.
Create and improve documentation
Have you created a significant piece of documentation regarding the implementation, development or use of Openbravo? Share it with us in our Open Discussion forum. Also you can help improve the current documentation after registering yourself in our Wiki. Check out our Help page for information on how to improve or create new articles.
Translate documentation
In the Openbravo project most of the documentation is at the project's Wiki. This allows people to modify and enhance the documentation, but also allows every one to translate the documentation into their language. Can you speak English and other language? See how you can translate the Wiki documentation and help other people around the world to use Openbravo.
Openbravo POS Localization
Is Openbravo still not available in your language? Check how you can help to translate Openbravo POS to new languages.
Report bugs
Have you found a bug? Please, report it to us using our bug database. Make sure that you carefully read our Bug Reporting Guidelines before submitting your bug report. Even better, you can also propose a bug fix for the issue.
Contributing ideas and feature requests
Do you have an idea for Openbravo POS? You can fill up a feature request. This process just communicates an idea to Openbravo that will implement the idea at its discretion. Since Openbravo it is an open source project, you can implement an idea into the product. See the next sections.
Contributing to Openbravo POS
If you are planning to contribute to Openbravo POS you should sign Openbravo standard contributor's agreement. If you have any question regarding this contract please contact us.
Openbravo POS is in continuous evolution. Check our roadmap to see which features we are working for the next versions of the product.
Contributing fixes
Do you have a fix for a bug in Openbravo? You need to create a file listing the changes you made, called a patch or a diff file. You can generate it using svn diff command.
To send us a patch you have to do:
svn diff > patch.diff
A patch.diff files with the changes is generated. When the patch is ready send it to Adrian Romero <adrian.romero at openbravo.com>. Please, detail in the bug description, what your proposed patch exactly fixes.
Contributing new features
Some suggestions to consider when working on functionality:
- Be consistent with the current design principles of Openbravo POS: based on open standards, client server web based architecture, support for all web browsers, etc.
- Design in the open. Before you start coding a single line, make a proposal of the design of the new functionality at Openbravo developers forum.
Obtaining Write Access to Subversion
Openbravo POS source code lives in Subversion. Everyone can read the source code but only developers can write on it. You need written access permission to Openbravo Subversion to be able to send your code to Subversion directly.
Category: OpenbravoPOS