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 you find such a bug and fix it using less than eight lines, you can post the fix in the forum.

Note: please read the "amendment announcement" to this Wiki entry Patch-Sized Contributions Without JCA.

If the fix/patch exceeds a size of about eight lines of code, you will need to sign the Joint Copyright Assignment. 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.

The main reason for this is to allow future license changes without having to get the permission of everyone who was ever involved in SharpDevelop. We already did such a license change once, when we switched from GPL to LGPL in 2005.

After having signed the JCA, you will get access to the sharpdevelop-contributors mailing list. For submitting patches, please use GitHub pull requests. Someone from the team will review your patches and commit them to the repository if they are OK.