Welcome to OpenTelemetry! This document provides general guidance for contributing to
this codebase. This is a multi-lingual codebase, so sub-directories like collector may
provide additional guidance in a CONTRIBUTING.md.
contribute to the code base. Feel free to browse the open
issues
and file new ones, all feedback welcome!
Please make sure to read and observe our Code of Conduct.
Before you can contribute, you will need to sign the Contributor License Agreement.
License information should be included in all source files where applicable. Either full or short version of the header should be used as described at apache.org. It is OK to exclude the year from the copyright notice. For the details on how to apply the copyright, see the next section.
OpenTelemetry follows CNCF recommendations for copyright notices. We use "Copyright The OpenTelemetry Authors" notice form.
According to CNCF recommendations if you are contributing third-party code you will need to retain the original copyright notice.
Any contributed third-party code must originally be Apache 2.0-Licensed or must carry a permisive software license that is compatible when combining with Apache 2.0 License. At this moment, BSD and MIT are the only OSI-approved licenses known to be compatible.
If you make substantial changes to the third-party code, prepend the contributed third party file with OpenTelemetry's copyright notice.
If the contributed code is not third-party code and you are the author we strongly encourage to avoid including your name in the notice and use the generic "Copyright The OpenTelemetry Authors" notice. See rationale for this recommendation here.
OpenTelemetry is a community project. Consequently, it is wholly dependent on its community to provide a productive, friendly, and collaborative environment.
- See Community Membership for a list the various responsibilities of contributor roles. You are encouraged to move up this contributor ladder as you gain experience.