CONTRIBUTING.md

Implementation IP Boundary

kernelCAD's implementation is clean-room and independent. Contributors must not paste source material from any commercial CAD product or any GPL/copyleft codebase into kernelCAD code or commits.

Architectural inspiration from public documentation of other CAD systems (Autodesk Fusion 360 published API docs, OpenCASCADE source, Replicad source, public CAD literature) is welcome; literal code copying is not.

When in doubt about the provenance of a snippet you want to use, ask in a PR comment before committing.

Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO)

All contributions must be signed off under the Developer Certificate of Origin 1.1. By signing off you certify that you wrote the contribution (or have the right to submit it) and that it may be distributed under the project's license.

Add a Signed-off-by line to every commit:

git commit -s -m "feat: my change"

This appends:

Signed-off-by: Your Name <your.email@example.com>

The name and email must match the commit author. CI rejects PRs containing commits without a sign-off. To fix existing commits:

git rebase --signoff develop && git push --force-with-lease

Release Hygiene

See docs/release-hygiene.md before publishing a release. A pushed tag is not enough; package.json, the local tag, the remote tag, the GitHub Release, and GitHub's Latest marker must all agree. The final verification command is:

npm run test:release-hygiene

Trademark

The MIT license covers the code only. Use of the kernelCAD name and logo is governed by TRADEMARKS.md.