Joining the Team

Thank you for visiting this page in the wiki. This hopefully means you are interested in helping us making SharpDevelop an even better Open Source IDE. Now you want to know how to go about it, great!

SharpDevelop is quite a big piece of code by now, small bugs that can be easily fixed therefore are unavoidable. If the fix is really small (like less than eight lines), you can post the fix in the forum. Otherwise we do prefer GitHub pull requests - and those need some attention, license-wise.

SharpDevelop has changed its license over the years from GPL to LGPL, and in 2014 to MIT. Those changes were possible because our contributors have signed the Joint Copyright Assignment. [1]

The change to MIT was largely due to our desire to make do without the JCA. The following rules now apply:

• For SharpDevelop 4.x, we still require the JCA (otherwise we couldn’t merge from 4.x to 5).
• For SharpDevelop 5, you can sign the JCA or add the following statement to your pull request:

I certify that I own, and have sufficient rights to contribute, all source code and related material intended to be compiled or integrated with the source code for the #develop open source product (the "Contribution"). My Contribution is licensed under the MIT License.

Unless we have a JCA on file or this statement is in your pull request, we cannot accept it. Someone from the team will review your patches and commit them to the repository if they are OK.

[1] The reason for this JCA is simple: protection for you and us from legal issues (e.g. patent infringement suits). The copyright is shared between you and our sponsor http://www.alphasierrapapa.com which will provide legal insurance should a legal challenge be raised. However, you are still free to use your contributed code in your own projects as well.