Contributing to OpenAdapt

August 26, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Thank you for your interest in contributing to OpenAdapt!

Product boundary

OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt is the launcher/meta-package and compatibility surface. The canonical compiler and governed runtime live in openadapt-flow. New engine, replay, repair, policy, and backend work belongs there.

The signed Production record provides the current admission state. Do not infer a lifecycle state from package availability, repository text, or a sibling repository.

Where to Contribute

  • This repository: launcher packaging, unified CLI compatibility, and CI.
  • openadapt-flow: compiler, replay, verification, governed repair, and backend implementation.
  • openadapt-agent: agent-facing MCP and Agent Skills integration over governed Flow bundles.
  • Other repositories: open issues only when their stated lifecycle and contribution guide match the proposed work.

Getting started

  1. Fork and clone the repository.

  2. Create a focused branch from current origin/main.

  3. Install the launcher in development mode:

    python -m pip install -e '.[dev]'

  4. Run the focused test suite and formatting checks:

    pytest
ruff check openadapt tests

  5. Open a pull request. The pull-request template lists the required release and source-boundary checks.

Guidelines

  • Follow the existing code style.
  • Test durable behavior and package contracts rather than ordinary copy.
  • Keep changes focused and update the canonical documentation when behavior changes.
  • Never place customer-derived data, deployment recipes, or secrets in a public fixture or package artifact.

Licensing and the open-core boundary

OpenAdapt is open-core. The public repositories (this launcher, openadapt-flow, openadapt-capture, openadapt-desktop, and the other openadapt-* engine repos) are MIT licensed: the mechanism and the public interfaces are open. The hosted control plane (OpenAdapt Cloud) is a proprietary commercial service, and certain data and empirical tuning stay private by policy.

What this means for contributions to the public repos:

  • Do not contribute application-specific recipes, customer fixtures, or proprietary system identifiers derived from real deployments (for example, automation content tied to a specific customer's EHR configuration). CI runs scripts/check_source_boundary.py to reject that class of content. That script keeps no denylist of its own: it reads source-policy.public.json, a generated file rendered from OpenAdapt's canonical source-availability manifest. Do not edit the generated file by hand; a rule changes at its source, and the guard fails closed if the file is missing or incomplete.
  • Do not contribute deployment-derived corpora, tuned adversary parameters, thresholds, oracle or connector recipes, or datasets tied to real systems of record. Synthetic, reproducible fixtures are welcome.
  • Do not copy or vendor GPL/AGPL/SSPL or otherwise non-MIT-compatible material into these repositories or their built packages.
  • The OpenAdapt name and logo are trademarks and are not covered by the MIT License; see TRADEMARKS.md.

Developer Certificate of Origin

By submitting a contribution you certify the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) 1.1: that you wrote the contribution or otherwise have the right to submit it under the MIT License. Signing off your commits (git commit -s) is appreciated but the certification applies to every contribution regardless.

A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) is under consideration but has not been adopted; today the DCO plus the MIT License govern contributions.

Questions?