Want to contribute? Great! First, read this page. We're sorting out policies and direction, but at the very least all contributions will be reviewed before they can be accepted.
Before we can use your code, you must sign a contributor's license agreement (CLA), which you can do online. There are two choices, depending on who legally owns your contribution:
- Google Individual Contributor License Agreement - if you own the contribution.
- Google Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License Agreement - if a corporation owns the contribution.
The CLA is necessary mainly because you own the copyright to your changes, even after your contribution becomes part of our codebase, so we need your permission to use and distribute your code. We also need to be sure of various other things -- for instance that you'll tell us if you know that your code infringes on other people's patents. You don't have to sign the CLA until after you've submitted your code for review and a member has approved it, but you must do it before we can put your code into our codebase.
Before you start working on a larger contribution, you should get in touch with us first through the issue tracker with your idea so that we can help out and possibly guide you. Coordinating up front makes it much easier to avoid frustration later on.