CONTRIBUTING.md

May 22, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions are greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion for improvements, please fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue. Don't forget to rate the project! Thanks again!

  1. Fork the Project
  2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
  3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
  4. Add your copyright statement into changed/added source files (.java).
    • For files where you made additions/modifications, add your copyright statement below the existing ones.
    • For new source files, add your copyright statement and the Apache 2.0 license text that you can find in any other .java file.
    • Additionally, add your name or the name of your organization as a one-liner to the CONTRIBUTORS.txt file in the root directory of this project.
    • For reference, you can check any other source file. The structure of your copyright statement must be: Copyright (c) <year> <org-name>. It may span multiple lines, like the Fraunhofer IOSB statement.
  5. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
  6. Open a Pull Request

Code Formatting

The project uses spotless:check in the build cycle, which means the project only compiles if all code, *.pom and *.xml files are formatted according to the project's codestyle definitions (see details on spotless). You can automatically format your code by running

mvn spotless:apply

This will also add default license headers with Fraunhofer IOSB (c) if there is no license header in a source file.

Additionally, you can import the eclipse formatting rules defined in /codestyle into our IDE.

Third Party License

If you use additional dependencies please be sure that the licenses of these dependencies are compliant with our License. If you are not sure which license your dependencies have, you can run

mvn license:aggregate-third-party-report

and check the generated report in the directory documentation/third_party_licenses_report.html.