About Contributions

RTSS is an open-source project and contributions are very welcome. The following web site sections contain documentation for people who are or would like to become RTSS contributors.

RTSS is free software. Although the license does not require it, it is strongly recommended and greatly appreciated that contributors assign copyright of their contributions to the Interdepartmental Research Center "E. Piaggio", including at the top of every file the following copyright notice:

    Copyright (C) 2010  Interdepartmental Research Center "E. Piaggio", University of Pisa

    This file is part of RTSS, the Robotics Toolbox for Scilab/Scicos.

    RTSS is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    RTSS is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with RTSS; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA

Anyway, the development team do want to credit and give thanks to those people that make the effort of creating code. For this reason, contributors should also add the following additional remarks in every file of their contribution:

    Author:     First Author's Name
    ...
    Author:     Last Author's Name
    Date:       mm/yy
    References: Books, Articles, Web-Links, Files, etc.

Copyright should be owned by the Interdepartmental Research Center "E. Piaggio" because of logistics issues: legal decisions or modifications to the code would become completely unworkable if there were mixed copyrights. In any case, authors can trust that their name will be maintained as it appears in the source files. Please contact the project administrator for more information.

How to Contribute

A good way to contribute to RTSS is testing the toolbox and reporting bugs.

Contributions in the form of bug fixes or enhancements to an existing piece of code, instead, should be emailed to the project admin. There are many ways to contribute to RTSS including

• sending patches for bugs;
• enhancing the error checking in function calls;
• rewriting existing functions to be more efficient;
• writing new demos with documentation;
• writing How-Tos and tutorials.

However, highly motivated people who wanted to partecipate more actively in the development of RTSS are encouraged to join the development team. For more informations, please contact the project administrator specifying an unassigned Development Task from the Tasklist at SourceForge.net. Please don't hesitate in suggesting other tasks.