There is a massive core framework which needs to be built, maintained, supported and fixed, I would certainly hope that people in the community would want to help do that.

We want to encourage participation from the community so that rapid progress can be made in making osCommerce the best and most flexible framework it can be, I would certainly hope there are people out there willing to do more than just complain about lack of progress and actually get involved.

We are now making this possible and at the same time ensuring that the licensing of osCommerce core is a transparent as possible.

The CLA is a one-off form on the countdown site that you authenticate with using your forum credentials and then include your github username, then you go to github, fork the project and make your contribution, we can then easily merge that back into the core codebase.

Again, Github makes the whole development platform transparent and removes the need for us to manage patches etc which gives us more time to actually code.

But so now I am going to ask what is the benefit for a contributor to sign it then? We are all independent – whatever – people, adding contributions for various reasons one of which I would guess is to promote our names or businesses (human nature).

GPL ensures source code inclusion with a release, which means the exposure of the author’s name via the copyright in the source files. What the BSD is offering if someone encodes the source? I don’t want my name excluded from a possible distribution and I don’t know others who would think otherwise in the open source community.

Now I don’t know what are the steps to sign the CLA when you try to post code. Is it an optional step that pops up when you try to submit code or a separate page altogether? Because in the former case I would think it’s a trick.

And since this post is about contributing code in general, may I ask to change the configuration of the IPB forum so attachments in public forum posts are accessible even when not logged in? Because right now it shows:
[#10171] You do not have permission to view this attachment.

Few years ago I posted code as an attachment for the alpha3 and then realized I couldn’t access the code if I wasn’t logged in. If I knew it in advance I wouldn’t included the code there. Attachments are uploaded on the server so there are no external links that can be manipulated like with other things eg: external avatars.