We encourage participation in open source projects and strive to have as few rules for this as possible, we expect Zalandos to follow common sense on what code and information they contribute – if in doubt, contact the open source team, or talk to your lead.

Summary

The following applies if you do the contribution in the context of work at Zalando, as then Zalando owns the copyright on your works.

Common contribution rules

Non-code contributions

Contributions such as reporting issues, writing documentation, reviewing code and participating in project maintenance such as creating roadmaps, grooming backlogs etc.

These activities are all sanctioned and encouraged as part of your employment at Zalando.

Code contributions

Upstream code contributions are also encouraged and is a natural extension of our dependency of open source projects in our tech stack. Code contributions can generally be divided into 2 categories:

Both are sanctioned and does not require a review. Simply ensure that the project you are contributing to is not licensed under AGPL.

Finding projects to contribute to

We recommend taking a look at the Zalando Tech Radar to get an overview of the projects we actively use, which would be an obvious starting point for contributions.

Allowlisted CLAs

If a non-Zalando open source project asks you to sign a contributor agreement, get it cleared with the open source team, unless it is one of the following which have been allowlisted: