# Contributing

[![Project](https://img.shields.io/badge/project-holochain-blue.svg?style=flat-square)](http://holochain.org/)
[![Discuss](https://img.shields.io/badge/chat-forum%2eholochain%2eorg-blue.svg?style=flat-square)](https://forum.holochain.org)

As an Open Source project Holochain welcomes many sorts of contributions, bug-report & fixes, code contributes, documentation, tests, feedback and more.

## Social
We are committed to foster a vibrant thriving community, including growing a culture that breaks cycles of marginalization and dominance behavior. In support of this, some open source communities adopt [Codes of Conduct](http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/3/0/).  

## Coordination

* For support be sure to explore our [Developer Resources and Documentation](https://developer.holochain.org)
* Please chat with us on our [online forums](https://forum.holochain.org)

## Test Driven Development
We use **test driven development**. When you add a new function or feature, be sure to add both unit tests and integration tests to shows that it works.  Pull requests without tests will most-likely not be accepted!

## Git Hygiene
This section describes our practices and guidelines for using git and making changes to the repo.

* We use Github's pull requests as our code review tool
* We encourage any dev to comment on pull requests and we think of the pull request not as a "please approve my code" but as a space for co-developing, i.e. asynchronous "pair-coding" of a sort.
* We develop features on separate branches sometimes identified by the Github issue number, i.e. `124-my-new-feature`
* We use merge (not rebase) so that commits related to a ticket can be retroactively explored.
* In most repos development happens on a `develop` branch which gets merged to master when there's a release.

## License
Holochain is licensed under the Cryptographic Autonomy License [![License: CAL v1](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-CAL%201.0-blue.svg)](https://github.com/holochain/cryptographic-autonomy-license) which is the first [Open Source Initiative approved](https://opensource.org/licenses/CAL-1.0) license designed for distributed software. As such it is designed to protect the rights of end-users of applications built on Holochain to own their own data and cryptographic keys. See [this article](https://medium.com/holochain/understanding-the-cryptographic-autonomy-license-172ac920966d) for more detail about licensing requirements of P2P software.

Other components, applications, and libraries we build are typically shared under the [Apache License v2](http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0) as a simple, lighweight, and flexible way to share code.

Copyright (C) 2017 - 2022, Holochain Foundation