How to contribute a patch to Samba ---------------------------------- Please see https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Contribute for detailed set-by-step instructions on how to submit a patch for Samba via GitLab. Samba's GitLab mirror is at https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba Ownership of the contributed code --------------------------------- Samba is a project with distributed copyright ownership, which means we prefer the copyright on parts of Samba to be held by individuals rather than corporations if possible. There are historical legal reasons for this, but one of the best ways to explain it is that it's much easier to work with individuals who have ownership than corporate legal departments if we ever need to make reasonable compromises with people using and working with Samba. We track the ownership of every part of Samba via git, our source code control system, so we know the provenance of every piece of code that is committed to Samba. So if possible, if you're doing Samba changes on behalf of a company who normally owns all the work you do please get them to assign personal copyright ownership of your changes to you as an individual, that makes things very easy for us to work with and avoids bringing corporate legal departments into the picture. If you can't do this we can still accept patches from you owned by your employer under a standard employment contract with corporate copyright ownership. It just requires a simple set-up process first. We use a process very similar to the way things are done in the Linux kernel community, so it should be very easy to get a sign off from your corporate legal department. The only changes we've made are to accommodate the licenses we use, which are GPLv3 and LGPLv3 (or later) whereas the Linux kernel uses GPLv2. The process is called signing. How to sign your work --------------------- Once you have permission to contribute to Samba from your employer, simply email a copy of the following text from your corporate email address to contributing@samba.org ------------------------------------------------------------ Samba Developer's Declaration, Version 1.0 By making a contribution to this project, I certify that: (a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the appropriate version of the GNU General Public License; or (b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source license and I have the right under that license to submit that work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part by me, under the GNU General Public License, in the appropriate version; or (c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other person who certified (a) or (b) and I have not modified it. (d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are public and that a record of the contribution (including all metadata and personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with the Samba Team's policies and the requirements of the GNU GPL where they are relevant. (e) I am granting this work to this project under the terms of both the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of these Licenses, or (at the option of the project) any later version. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html ------------------------------------------------------------ We will maintain a copy of that email as a record that you have the rights to contribute code to Samba under the required licenses whilst working for the company where the email came from. Then when sending in a patch via the normal mechanisms described above, add a line that states: Signed-off-by: Random J Developer using your real name and the email address you sent the original email you used to send the Samba Developer's Declaration to us (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.) That's it ! Such code can then quite happily contain changes that have copyright messages such as : (C) Example Corporation. and can be merged into the Samba codebase in the same way as patches from any other individual. You don't need to send in a copy of the Samba Developer's Declaration for each patch, or inside each patch. Just the sign-off message is all that is required once we've received the initial email. Have fun and happy Samba hacking ! The Samba Team. The "Samba Developer's Declaration, Version 1.0" is: (C) 2011 Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. (C) 2005 Open Source Development Labs, Inc. licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License as found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode and based on "Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1" as found at http://web.archive.org/web/20070306195036/http://osdlab.org/newsroom/press_releases/2004/2004_05_24_dco.html