Contributing to Draupnir
Welcome
Hi, thank you for considering to contribute to Draupnir. We want this process to be as welcoming as possible, no matter your experience level, or the kind of contribution that you want to make.
If you believe that your experience is anything but that, please let us know!
Do not worry about following the guidance in this document to the letter, we'd much rather you get involved than avoid doing so because of a technicality. Please keep this in mind throughout.
Getting Started
What kind of contribution are you trying to make?
If you are looking to document an issue, request a feature, develop a feature, please proceed into the Issue section.
If you are looking to develop or contribute a fix, feature, or documentation for an existing issue, please proceed to the Fixing or implementing an existing issue section.
Issue
If you can, just open the issue on the repository and we'll see it and come speak to you.
Alternatively, if you aren't comfortable doing so or can't phrase the problem or feature, then come speak to us in our support room. We'll probably end up creating the issue for you!
In either case, you should join our support room #draupnir:matrix.org :3
Do not worry about making duplicates or alignment with project goals, the triage process is supposed to find that for you.
Fixing or implementing an existing issue
If we have triaged the issue, even without writing our own context or clarifications, then the issue is likely ready to implement.
You should write a small statement in the issue or a quick message to our support room about how you intend to resolve the issue before getting started.
If you don't know how to get started or what to change, please ask! We'd love nothing more than to help you, or at the least, make our documentation and process better.
Where to start
Join our room #draupnir:matrix.org!
How Draupnir works
Checkout our context document.
Code
Checkout our development guide.
Issues & Triaging
We don't have a specific guide for opening issues, just go ahead.
You can read about our issue triaging process here
Documentation
WIP, our documentation isn't great!
If you know how we can improve that then let us know!
Currently we just have markdown documents, but maybe we need something more complete? like a markdown book?
Go ahead and edit anything.
Making Pull Requests
The preferred and easiest way to contribute changes to Draupnir is to fork the relevant repo on github, and then create a pull request to ask us to pull your changes into the repo.
We use Github Actions for continuous integration. If your change breaks the build, this will be shown in GitHub, so please keep an eye on the pull request for feedback.
Sign off
We ask that everybody who contributes to Draupnir repositories signs off their contributions, as explained below.
We follow a simple 'inbound=outbound' model for contributions: the act of submitting an 'inbound' contribution means that the contributor agrees to license their contribution under the same terms as the project's overall 'outbound' license - in our case, this is the Academic Free License v. 3.0 (see LICENSE).
In order to have a concrete record that your contribution is intentional and you agree to license it under the same terms as the project's license, we've adopted the same lightweight approach used by the Linux Kernel, Docker, and many other projects: the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). This is a simple declaration that you wrote the contribution or otherwise have the right to contribute it to Matrix:
Developer Certificate of Origin
Version 1.1
Copyright (C) 2004, 2006 The Linux Foundation and its contributors.
660 York Street, Suite 102,
San Francisco, CA 94110 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this
license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
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 open source license
indicated in the file; 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 same open source license (unless I am
permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
in the file; or
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
person who certified (a), (b) or (c) 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
personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
this project or the open source license(s) involved.
If you agree to this for your contribution, then all that's needed is to include the line in your commit or pull request comment:
Signed-off-by: Your Name <your@email.example.org>
Git allows you to add this signoff automatically when using the -s
flag to git commit, which uses the name and email set in your
user.name and user.email git configs.
Conclusion
That's it! Matrix is a very open and collaborative project as you might expect given our obsession with open communication. If we're going to successfully matrix together all the fragmented communication technologies out there we are reliant on contributions and collaboration from the community to do so. So please get involved - and we hope you have as much fun hacking on Matrix as we do!
Further notes on license and its relation to business in general
Ultimately most open source software contributions start by gifting labour without any obligation or transaction.
There is no ethical way to directly sell this labour.
Many so called post open source[^post-open-source] ideas fixate on finding a way to conduct business in an ethical way, and this is problematic.
Once you start working within capitalism with capitalism, and exchange your power and influence over a work to monetize the work itself, the work will gain inertia and a power of its own that you cannot control. You will work for the work, for external interests, and these won't be the interests of your powerless users who you were among to begin with.
It would be extreme, but I am tempted to suggest that by performing a business this way, you are part of an effort which not only reinforces capitalism but works to make it more efficient. Effectively working to make capitalism more powerful. Congratulations.
Another point that is often brought up in these discussions is how software licensing relies on an appeal to state power, the power of the law.
Therefore I propose a new licensing model, one which appeals to the power of public pressure rather than the law.
Such a license would be liberal, allowing incorporating into proprietary works provided it retained a notice. However, any work which is used in any way to conduct business must report all software being used by the business with this license, all turnover made by the business, all profit made by the business and an estimation of both profit and turnover made by the business in relation to the collection of software reported.
It is not clear to me how often these figures should be reported and when, or even where they should be reported to (ideally they could be found centrally). It is also unclear how to create the legalise required.
With the information these licenses would provide, public pressure could then be used to demand reparations for the profits made by pillaging and destructive businesses. It is not clear yet how any reparations would be distributed, probably through some system of venture communes. The idea is to ensure that the developers and users of projects would not be distracted from providing each other mutual support and to give them a hope of escaping.
[^post-open-source] https://applied-langua.ge/posts/the-poverty-of-post-open-source.html.