Contributing to the ns-3 project
--------------------------------

ns-3 is an open source project backed by an NSF CISE CRI grant. 
Although the NSF PIs have specific aims to fulfill, we want others to 
contribute, and we'd like to have a broad community of users and 
developers, with the goal of a self-sustaining project downstream. 
The project is currently in a bootstrapping phase, but we welcome 
ambitious developers who might want to help shape the early design.

Despite the lack of a formal contribution process to the ns-3
project, there are a number of steps which we expect every
potential contributor to follow. These naturally stem from 
the open-source roots of the project:

  - first, you should subscribe to the ns-developers 
    mailing-list (see http://www.nsnam.org/mailing_lists.html)

  - then, you should send an email there stating your interest
    in working on a specific part of the models and trying
    to explain how you would like to implement it, what 
    resources you have, etc.

  - you should be prepared to work together with the other
    potential contributors who want to work on the same models.

  - you should be prepared to go through code reviews with the
    ns-3 development team prior to integration. The goal of these
    code reviews is to:
      - ensure adherence to the coding style of the project
        (see doc/codingstyle.html)
      - ensure that the structure of your code has a certain 
        coherence with regard to the rest of the ns-3 codebase
      - improve the quality of the code: we strongly believe in
        the old saying: "many eyes make all bugs shallow".
      - increase code reuse by trying to generalize certain 
        useful pieces of your code to make them available to
        other models.

  - you should be prepared to try to integrate as many tests
    in the codebase as possible: we understand that writing
    tests is not sexy and that not everyone is convinced that
    they improve the code-writing poductivity which is why
    we do not enforce strict rules about testing. However,
    we expect model authors to answer basic questions about
    how they plan to test and validate their models.

  - you should be prepared to maintain your model once it is
    integrated: while we consider every bug filed against the 
    simulator as being a bug we must deal with and while we 
    will try to fix as many bugs as humanly possible, we
    also expect model authors to act as responsible maintainers
    and be reactive to bug reports concerning their models.

  - The project has decided upon GNU GPLv2 as the licensing structure. 
    All simulation software in the ns-3 repositories will be GNU GPLv2 
    or GNU GPLv2-compatible (with non-GPLv2 licensing reserved for
    ports of pre-existing code under a different license, such as BSD).
    You do not have to assign your copyright to the ns-3 project but
    you must accept the terms of the GPLv2 and attest that your 
    contributions can be licensed under those terms.  See the 
    following link:
    http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/info/GPLv2.html
