Contribution Glossary

Browse 4 contribution terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

4 Contribution Terms

Contributor License Agreement: A legal agreement that contributors sign before their code can be accepted into an open-source project. CLAs typically grant the project maintainers rights to...
Open Source Contributor: A person who contributes code, documentation, triage, design, translations, or other work to an open source project. The term matters culturally because...
Sweat Equity: Ownership earned through labor, expertise, or effort rather than cash investment. In startups, sweat equity often describes what founders and early...
Upstream / Downstream: Upstream and Downstream in software development describe the relationship between original source repositories and their derivatives. Upstream refers to the...