Contribution Guidelines

As an open-source project, we welcome and encourage the community to submit patches directly to the SOF project. In our collaborative open source environment, standards and methods for submitting changes help reduce the chaos that can result from an active development community.

This document explains how to participate in project conversations, log and track bugs and enhancement requests, and submit patches to the project so your patch will be accepted quickly in the codebase.

Licensing

Licensing is very important to open source projects. It helps ensure the software continues to be available under the terms that the author desired.

The SOF project uses a BSD-3-Clause license, as found in the https://github.com/thesofproject/sof/tree/master/LICENCE file in the project’s GitHub repo.

A license tells you what rights you have as a developer, as provided by the copyright holder. It is important that the contributor fully understands the licensing rights and agrees to them. Sometimes the copyright holder isn’t the contributor, such as when the contributor is doing work on behalf of a company.

Developer Certification of Origin (DCO)

To make a good faith effort to ensure licensing criteria are met, project SOF requires the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) process to be followed.

The DCO is an attestation attached to every contribution made by every developer. In the commit message of the contribution, (described more fully later in this document), the developer simply adds a Signed-off-by statement and thereby agrees to the DCO.

When a developer submits a patch, it is a commitment that the contributor has the right to submit the patch per the license. The DCO agreement is shown below and at http://developercertificate.org/.

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.

DCO Sign-Off Methods

The DCO requires that a sign-off message, in the following format, appears on each commit in the pull request:

Signed-off-by: Sofforus Jones <sjones@gmail.com>

The DCO text can either be manually added to your commit body, or you can add either -s or --signoff to your usual Git commit commands. If you forget to add the sign-off, you can also amend a previous commit with the sign-off by running git commit --amend -s. If you have already pushed your changes to GitHub, you will need to force push your branch after this with git push -f.

Note

The name and email address of the account you use to submit your PR must match the name and email address on the Signed-off-by line in your commit message.

Prerequisites

As a contributor, familiarize yourself with the SOF project, how to configure, install, and use it as explained on the SOF project website, and how to set up your development environment as introduced in the project’s Getting Started Guides.

You should be familiar with common developer tools such as Git and platforms such as GitHub.

If you have not already done so, create a (free) GitHub account on https://github.com and have Git tools available on your development system.