Any help is appreciated to improve pyswarm. You can participate in many ways: discuss with users and developers on features, suggest new features, test releases, report bugs, prepare packages, bring in your experience as advisor, write proposals, write code (Python, SQL), write documentation or single articles, or review and edit code and documents, etc. If this is your first open-source project you may want to read this article: Working on Free Software.
Any participation that is a non-trivial contribution to the code base or documentation which will be part of the official pyswarm distribution is subject to the Section 6.5.2, “ pyswarm Contribution Policy (Draft) ”.
contact Anastasios Hatzis if you have any question
subscribe to the pyswarm-devs mailing list for developers' technical discussion (very low traffic)
subscribe to the pyswarm-svn for all Subversion commit notifications (medium traffic)
subscribe to the pyswarm-issues for all tracker items notifications (low traffic)
Have a look on Part VIII, “Discussion of Future Development” to see proposals for current and future development.
On behalf of technical and legal issues this contribution policy is developed, but is not completed in detail yet. However, beside some obvious SourceForge.net tools that are used (Subversion repository, mailing lists, forums, file download area, project Web-site, ...) this policy will copy with legal issues especially regarding intellectual property. If you have never contributed to an open-source project you may want to learn more on this issues here: Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors.
Such joint copyright assignments hold by a single legal entity are common in many open-source projects, especially in the larger and older ones and a strict contribution policy on this base is absolutely crucial for long-term legal safety of Free Software projects, such as pyswarm. Since pyswarm has been initially published in the E.U. under German law, there is a different concept to U.S. copyright called authorship right. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is providing a Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA), covering both concepts of intelectual property. In addition, the Freedom Task Force at the FSFE provides related services to Free Software projects.
The FSFE became legal guardian of the pyswarm project on 2007-01-23. One effect of this cooperation is the application of the FLA. By signing the FLA the beneficiaries of the pyswarm project do assign non-exclusive copyrights on their own part of pyswarm to the FSFE. By the same time each beneficiary will keep the rights on the own work to use it in other programs and publish under any licenses of choice. In addition the FLA makes obligations to any contributor not to infringe intellectual property of 3rd-parties, e.g. by contributing stolen source code. (Please note, that the terms intellectual property and much more in this context steal are very disputable terms, but you got the idea)
The FLA can be considered as the legal framework to pool all copyrights of the entire work (pyswarm sources and documentation) in one legal entity, the FSFE, so the FSFE can legally defend the project and enforce its intellectual property if necessary. Click on the FLA link above to learn more on this issue.
Signing the FLA would be a requirement for anyone prior the first contribution to pyswarm. In this context, contribution means any contribution to the code base or documentation which will be part of the official pyswarm distribution. Exceptions to this requirement are only contributions which would definitely not be considered as creation of intelectual property , such as minor bug-fixes or corrections of typos and phrases in documents. Write access to the project's Subversion repository is only granted after project admin receives confirmation by FSFE that signed copies of the FLA have been received. In the case that the copyrights to be assigned are shared with a company, such as the employer of a contributor, also this company has to sign the FLA. Employees should also be aware that they may need prior approval by their employers if they want to actively contribute work to the project - in some cases even though, if the work is not created during labor time of the employee. This depends strongly on legal situation in your country and/or terms and conditions of your employment contract. In contrary, in other countries laws and contracts may entitle an employer to assign copyrights without approval by employees involved in the creation.
Download the pyswarm Fiduciary License Agreement
Print two copies of the FLA and sign them
Eventually, if your assignment is not solely at your decicision, you need an additional party signing this FLA (employer, employee, any other contractor,..)
Specify on the title page the address to which you want the FSFE to return one of the signed copies back.
Don't forget to provide at user name the login name at SourceForge.net which would be used to commit to the project's Subversion repository and access to other services of SF.net used by pyswarm.
Send both copies to the FSFE, address is provided on the title page.
The FTF at the FSFE will process your FLA. If everything is okay, they will send one signed copy to the address you provided. A project admin of pyswarm will receive confirmation of FSFE, invites the provided user account as project member (if not done before) with appropriate privileges to access project's resources.