Contribution Directions

These guidelines are general directions, if you have additional information, questions, or need of special allowances, feel free to contact me, Jason Burrell.

1. Make sure your changes or additions are consistent with the exsisting body of work or with future design decisions (see Bugzilla). If you disagree with those decisions, feel free to discuss them on the mailing lists or with the interested parties.
2. Make sure you have the legal right to contribute these changes to L’âne (a project licensed under the GPL). As this issue is large, one must consider several subpoints:
   1. the contribution contains only code you created yourself, without any assistance from other code-bases or other people
   2. the contribution was not preformed for hire, or was performed for hire with copyright assignments and re-assignment authority
   3. the contribution was not created by a person whose work is in this or a related field (as your employer will likely own the copyright even if you created it in your “off time”)
3. You must assign the copyright to Jason B. Burrell, the copyright holder of the L’âne code-base. See the FSF's discussion on this matter.
4. You must state you read and understood this document and everything it implies.

This somewhat draconian procedure is an effort to avoid the legal problems that the SCO Group has created (highlighted?) with respect to Linux. As I am not an intellectual property lawyer, you should consult one for accurate legal advice. Additionally, the Free Software Foundation may be able to help clarify some issues regarding the GPL.

It may also be important to consider this software is held in Effingham County in the State of Illinois, United States of America.