nayafia / contributing-template Goto Github PK

Hi there! This looks great! I thought it may be handy to recommend people reference the material as mentioned on makeapullrequest.com:

**Working on your first Pull Request?** You can learn how from this *free* series [How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub](https://egghead.io/series/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github)

I wasn't sure where the best place for this would be. Maybe in Your First Contribution or Getting started.

Full disclosure, that series of lessons is from me and even though it's free I make money when people watch it. But my motive is to help lower the barrier of entry to Open Source (as I believe is your motivation as well).

"Be concise. Adding too much detail might actually make people less likely to read your guide, which will defeat the purpose."

I'll show myself out...

Unfortunately I don't know much about this or what standard practices are but it's probably good to tell potential contributors how they'll be credited, if at all. Will they be given credit in the README file? What portion of their work will fall under their copyright? If it's for a business or organization are the contributors handing over their copyright to the organization?

Wikipedia has an article on contributor license agreements. For reference, here are some CLAs of note:

• Google CLA
• Apache Software Foundation Individual CLA
• Apache Software Foundation Corporate CLA

Googling around produces an article by Bradley Kuhn called "Why Your Project Doesn't Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement" so I guess there's some controversy about whether a CLA is even needed or is overkill.

Here's a link dump of potentially useful links:

• "Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors" by Eben Moglen
• "What is a CLA and why do I care?" by Tony Guntharp from CLAHub
• "CLAHub - CLA's Done Right" by Tony Guntharp
• "Contributor Licence Agreements" by Ross Gardler and Rowan Wilson from OSS Watch
• "Not all CLAs are equal" by Matthew Garrett
• "A CLA By Any Other Name" by Pamela Jones from Groklaw
• "When a company asks for your copyright" by Richard Stallman from the FSF
• "Linus Torvalds Says All Contributor License Agreements Are Broken" by Silviu Stahie at news.softpedia.com

I feel like I barely understand the issue. Maybe it would be good enough to have something like the agreement that StackOverflow has in place for it's Subscriber Content? I don't know how this translates to source code, though.

This template helped a lot the organization I work with and also my own side open source projects I think It might help a lot of people that doesn't speak english and also maintains foss projects.

I would like to completely translate this guide so you can have it able also in spanish.

What you think? Can I help with that?

You might want to discuss contributor license agreements. Contributors might want to be clear on what they are giving and getting when they contribute.

Hi there.

I'm planning on re-releasing a tool named Unleash under the Netflix brand soon. It was previously released under my own name at https://github.com/jameswomack/unleash

I'd like to make Unleash better by including additional pieces that a software project needs to be successful, including a "contributing" file. Your project looks like a good one to base it on, and I'd like your permission to do so.