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Contributing to GitButler
So you're interested in contributing to GitButler. Amazing!
Understand the License
First thing to know, GitButler is not a side project, it is the product of a pretty cool company located in Berlin who develop this client and its associated services professionally. For this reason, we have licensed this software under the Functional Source License, a mostly permissive non-compete license that converts to Apache 2.0 or MIT after two years.
So, it's not strictly OSS, but it will be. You're free to contribute, but you can't take this and use it to compete with us. You can, however, otherwise use it however you want.
We figured this is better than closed source while still letting us make a living from our hard work without worrying too much about bad actors.
Our Development Process
As a private company, we have our own development processes that we try to be fairly open about, but we're all sitting in a room in Berlin, so external contributions and remote work aren't really a central part of our process.
It's possible that you want to see a feature, and we disagree, so if you want to get something accepted, please discuss it with us first, so we can all be fairly confident that your work has a chance to be accepted before you spend your time or result in needing to maintain a fork.
The two places to communicate with us are on Discord and GitHub (issues and discussions, etc.).
Join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/MmFkmaJ42D
Submitting a Bug Report
You probably know how to submit a bug report.
You know, check first to see if something is already there, give us detail to recreate it if at all possible. Things you would want you to do if you were maintaining this project.
Submitting a Change
If you talked it over with us, and we agree that it's something we would take, please do the familiar GitHub dance of forking the repository and submitting a Pull Request, so we can review and possibly merge it.
Any contributions sent to us implicitly give us the right to redistribute that work under the same license and rights.
Why we don't explicitly require a CLA for contributions to GitButler
How will GitButler Stay in Business?
The client is open source and free to use, forever. If you want to use this as your Git client, it will never be pulled out from under you.
In parallel with this client, we're also developing some rad cloud services that you can optionally enable but are not necessary or limiting to your client experience. If we can provide some compelling team functionality that you can get your boss to pay for, then we would love to have your business in that area. If it's not interesting to you, then never fear, the client is fully functional on its own and totally free.
Kudos
We love our community. Whether you just join Discord to give us some feedback, file a well researched issue, or submit a killer PR, we are excited that you care about what we're doing.
However, helping us with our codebase is over the top. We'll call out our contributors in some way, though we haven't quite figured out how yet. But rest assured, we'll give you credit. Or schwag, maybe. Or a beer, if you're ever in town.
Get into the Code!
Ok, you're officially onboarded. Grab the code and start in on the DEVELOPMENT.md file.
God speed.