Contribution Guide

So you want to get involved with MousePaw Media's open source development? Awesome! We've worked hard to make this process and smooth and simple as possible.

  1. Read through our Terms of Development , which you are agreeing to by contributing code or other content to MousePaw Media. This is to save everyone a few dozen headaches; it assures you that we'll always be open source, and it enables us to re-license the code and content as necessary.
  2. Sign into our instance of Phabricator using your GitHub credentials. This is where all of our development work takes place.
  3. Follow our handy Getting Started guide , which will walk you through the process of setting up your development environment and checking out a repository.
  4. The best way to connect with us is through Phabricator, but depending on the day and time, you may be able to find us on our Libera.Chat IRC chatroom.

FAQs: Contributing

(Click a question to view the answer.)

Why do I need a GitHub account?

GitHub is fairly ubiquitous among programmers; the majority of developers have accounts there. GitHub accounts are also more frequently legitimate - developers rely on them to track and display their code contributions - which helps us ensure that the majority of people signing up for Phabricator are real people.

Why don't you accept GitHub pull requests?

We use Phabricator for all of our development work. We've found that the features of that platform fit our workflow better than GitHub does.

What are those weird ".arc[whatever]" files on your repositories?

Those allow Phabricator to interface with Git and do all sorts of neat code review stuff for us. You can safely ignore those - you will never need them.

What's with the Terms of Development?

That's to save everyone a few dozen headaches. If we realize later that we need to license a project under different terms, we don't want to try and track down a few hundred people.

Besides that, it simply states that your code is licensed to us under the MIT License, unless you select the BSD 3-Clause License. Your non-code content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Third, it holds us accountable - as long as we're using your code, the project you contributed to shall have an open-source license.

Don't the Terms of Development still leave room for you to profit from my contribution?

Yes. However, no open source license prevents that! Under any Open Source license, anyone can create derivate works, and can also sell those derivative works. Very few licenses even prevent others from making those derivative works proprietary and closed-source.

In other words, in exchange for your permission to relicense, the Terms of Development is actually granting you more of a guarantee than most open source licenses would; we will always ensure that any project we use your contribution in has at least one open source license.

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