About Open Source Code Review

   

There are many open source software packages on the internet, and they are under different Licenses. I take a look at 2 of them and discuss something about them.

1. Bitcoin

Bitcoin is released under the MIT License. The contents of MIT License is below:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Their code contributing process is that developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests when they think their feature or bug fix is ready. If it is a simple/trivial/non-controversial change, then one of the Bitcoin development team members simply pulls it.If it is a more complicated or potentially controversial change, then the patch submitter will be asked to start a discussion (if they haven't already) on the mailing list.
The patch will be accepted if there is broad consensus that it is a good thing. Developers should expect to rework and resubmit patches if the code doesn't match the project's coding conventions (see doc/coding.md) or are controversial.
The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be completely stable. Tags are created regularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin also suggests contributors to create unit test cases which will help the code review period shorter. They review codes very carefully cause this products cant be anything wrong, or it will cause users losing a lot of money. However, it will take long time to apply a patch.

2. RethinkDB
RethinkDB is an open-source distributed database. It has an intuitive query language, automatically parallelized queries, and simple administration. It is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

The content is in the link: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/blob/next/COPYRIGHT

You can check out the source code from Github, make a fork and contribute. you need to add the mailing list to communicate with them, or go to IRC to chat with them.

There are many other open source package based on different Licenses, and code reviewing process is also different.