From very early on (Feb 2011), openATTIC has been licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and new releases were made publicly available for download.

However, contributing patches or submitting code for new features was somewhat of an ordeal, as it required filling out and submitting a "Contributor License Agreement". This was mandatory, as we wanted to maintain the option to relicense openATTIC under a different license.

Going forward, this is no longer a requirement. Instead, we have decided to adopt the "sign-off" procedure introduced by the Linux kernel.

The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the commit or pull request, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to pass it on as an open-source patch. We have documented the exact process in the openATTIC Contributing Guidelines.

Unfortunately, unlike git, the Mercurial DVCS does not provide a built-in option to add the required Signed-off-by line below a commit message automatically. Therefore, we created a simple Mercurial signoff hook that you can install into the .hg directory of your local openATTIC repository (see the comment header for installation instructions).

Hopefully this will further lower the hurdle for external developers for submitting patches or contributing code.

If you're looking for interesting tasks that could be tackled, take a look at our public openATTIC Jira instance. We use this instance to coordinate all our work and to collect open issues and tasks.

The openATTIC Jira tracker will replace the current bug tracker on BitBucket.

So if you want to report a new bug or comment on an existing issue, either sign up for a new account, or use your existing Facebook, GitHub or Google account for authentication.

We are looking forward to your feedback and suggestions!

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