Contributing#

The pept library is not a one-man project; it is being built, improved and extended continuously (directly or indirectly) by an international team of researchers of diverse backgrounds - including programmers, mathematicians and chemical / mechanical / nuclear engineers. Want to contribute and become a PEPTspert yourself? Great, join the team!

There are multiple ways to help:

  • Open an issue mentioning any improvement you think pept could benefit from.

  • Write a tutorial or share scripts you’ve developed that we can add to the pept documentation to help other people in the future.

  • Share your PEPT-related algorithms - tracking, post-processing, visualisation, anything really! - so everybody can benefit from them.

Want to be a superhero and contribute code directly to the library itself? Grand - fork the project, add your code and submit a pull request (if that sounds like gibberish but you’re an eager programmer, check this article). We are more than happy to work with you on integrating your code into the library and, if helpful, we can schedule a screen-to-screen meeting for a more in-depth discussion about the pept package architecture.

Naturally, anything you contribute to the library will respect your authorship - protected by the strong GPL v3.0 open-source license (see the “Licensing” section below). If you include published work, please add a pointer to your publication in the code documentation.

Licensing#

The pept package is GPL v3.0 licensed. In non-lawyer terms, the key points of this license are:

  • You can view, use, copy and modify this code _freely_.

  • Your modifications must _also_ be licensed with GPL v3.0 or later.

  • If you share your modifications with someone, you have to include the source code as well.

Essentially do whatever you want with the code, but don’t try selling it saying it’s yours :). This is a community-driven project building upon many other wonderful open-source projects (NumPy, Plotly, even Python itself!) without which pept simply would not have been possible. GPL v3.0 is indeed a very strong copyleft license; it was deliberately chosen to maintain the openness and transparency of great software and progress, and respect the researchers pushing PEPT forward. Frankly, open collaboration is way more efficient than closed, for-profit competition.