flycast/docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

[WIP]

What are nillware's plans for the project?

• We want reicast to be the best dreamcast emulator, available on every possible platform, with the source public, and at no cost of the end users.
• We are not really interested on making any money off of it, apart from guaranteeing its developers' sustainability.
• We'd really like that every regular/"important" contributor to get paid a reasonable amount of money for their work.

CLA Stuff

reicast has a CLA, which typically requires the commit author's signature. This means that any commit returned upstream from a fork of reicast also requires a CLA signature.

• This leaves two options for handling the commit.
  1. Either attempt to get the original author to put in the extra work of modifying and resubmitting it to reicast or
  2. alter the commit's recognized author by resubmitting it with a reference to the original commit.

Here's the current copyright structure of reicast

• Parts written independently (this covers over 95% of the source) are owned by nillware.
• Parts that were developed by skmp under contract, for which he doesn't have the copyright, but are licensed as GPL.
• Parts developed by the rest of the nulldc team (ZeZu, PsyMan). This code is under GPL, but the copyright belongs to them.
• 3rd party contributions to nulldc, before 2008-2009. We use them under GPL.
• Contributions to the reicast project. Copyright belongs to the contributors, we use them via GPL.
• 3rd party libraries.

We'll have to rewrite the parts that we can't get permission for though. And be advised, we are really good at "refactoring" code!