Open Source Development

The Open Charging Network is a community project by and for the Electric Vehicle Charging community. Its mission is to provide the EV Charging industry players an open, secure and decentralized network for digital interoperability. This is why the core components are developed open source under the Apache license Version 2.0.

The development of the Open Charging Network is driven and steered by the non-profit Share&Charge Foundation. Many users and community members are contributing to it in the form of feedback, raised issues, pull requests and dedicated working groups. This article should provide you with some guidance on how you can contribute to this project.

Version management

The production-ready version of every Open Charging Network component can be found in its Master branch

Development of each component can be found in its Develop branch. Pull requests should therefore generally derive from the develop branch, which will be eventually merged into the master branch to coincide with the release of a new version.

Bare in mind that new features that are big enough may warrant their own feature branch so that multiple contributors can work on them before being merged into the development branch.

Maturity Model, Feature Roadmap and Releases

The current state of development is made transparent with a maturity model, which describes the current and planned feature set: Maturity Model, Feature Roadmap and Releases

Monthly Developer Community Calls are being hosted to align the development of all software components. Anyone is invited to join. Learn more about it here.

If you are interested to work closely with the Share&Charge development team, you can join one of our working groups inside the Share&Charge Foundation.

Community support

If you need support in using or contributing to the Open Charging Network, join our Slack Community by requesting an invite by sending an email to partners@shareandcharge.com or use our Stack Overflow tag.

For all the latest news, check out our Developer Blog.

Reporting bugs and contribute with coding

Issues are raised, described and prioritized in our repositories on Bitbucket.

An overview of all issues across all repositories can be found here.

You can contribute fixes to bugs or new features by sending pull requests via Bitbucket. Using the Bitbucket UI, a pull request can be initiated from a branch in a fork of repository.

Before we can include your contributions to the Open Charging Network code, you need to give us permission. As the author of any creative work (including source code, or documentation), you control the copyright for that work. The Share&Charge Foundation can’t legally use your contribution unless you allow us to.

To manage this process, we use a mechanism called a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) popularized by The Linux Foundation. The DCO is a legally binding statement that asserts that you are the creator of your contribution, and that you license the work under the Apache License Version 2.0.

Please take the following steps so that we can include your work:

1) Each source file must include the following header:

Copyright 2020 <Your Name or Organization>

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

2) Each commit must include your sign-off

Your sign-off certifies that you are either the author of the contribution or have the right to submit it under the Apache 2.0 license used by the Share&Charge project. The sign-off is done by adding the following line to your source code:

Signed-off-by: John Doe <john.doe@example.com>

You must use your real name. Pseudonyms or anonymous contributions are not allowed.

If you set your user.name and user.email as part of your Git configuration, you can sign your commit automatically with git commit -s.

More tips on how to sign-off your work with Git can be found on this website: DITA Open Toolkit

The full text of the DCO is:

Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
 
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
 
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
     have the right to submit it under the open source license
     indicated in the file; or
 
(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
     of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
     license and I have the right under that license to submit that
     work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
     by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
     permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
     in the file; or
 
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
     person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
     it.
 
(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
     are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
     personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
     maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
     this project or the open source license(s) involved.