github is a social development tool which is intended to make it easy to contribute changes to projects. There is extensive documentation available at https://help.github.com/.

This page is intended to give EPrints-specific notes on contributing core changes.

We intend to keep the EPrints core Copyright University of Southampton, which will allow us to re-license the software in the future. We can never revoke the existing LGPL/GPL version of EPrints (nor would we wish to) but we need the ability to release under different licenses e.g. for commercial partners.

As with all Open Source software you are free to "fork" and develop your own software based on EPrints, as long as it adheres with the license agreement (currently LGPL/GPL - see the source for details).

If you are making changes to files copyrighted University of Southampton you need to assign the copyright in your contribution to University of Southampton. That covers anything in the software except for 3rd party modules bundled in perl_lib/ (see individual files for their licensing).

Fill out a CAA (individual or entity) located here:

https://github.com/eprints/eprints/raw/master/licenses/caa_individual.txt

https://github.com/eprints/eprints/raw/master/licenses/caa_entity.txt

In a separate pull request place your completed CAA in licenses/contributors/ (where the file name is your github username plus ".txt") and add your name to the list of contributors in AUTHORS.

You need only do this once.

If you do not wish to place your completed CAA in the source code please email it to support@eprints.org.