hw-gimletlet-nic/CONTRIBUTING.md

# Project status and open source

This repo is public because

1. It has always been our intention to make this open-source.
2. We figured it's best to err on the side of doing this early instead of late.
3. It may prove useful to those outside our company.

This is not a production design. It was designed for and served a specific 
purpose in support of our actual production designs. It is not under active
development, and comes with no warranty.

And so, we thought it was important to explain where we're currently at, and
manage your expectations.

- We are a small company.

- Our current goal is to get our first generation products finished and in
  customers' hands.

- We've created this design in support of our end-goal, not as its own thing. 
  We're all working on the products, and tool development is a side effect.

- For expediency, we've made "get-it-done" choices with libraries and parts. 
  We may split or clean this up later, but, for now, we're primarily focused on
  getting _our_ product ready, because, again, we need to finish our computers.

- These points together mean that we may not have enough bandwidth to review and
  integrate outside PRs right now.

You're welcome to send PRs! If we have time, or if the PRs are very small or fix
bugs, we may even integrate them in the near future. But be aware that we might
not get to it for a while, by which time it might no longer be relevant.

We've all dealt with those open source projects that feel open in name only, and
have big patches and history-free source drops appearing from behind the walls
of some large organization. We don't like that, and we're not going to do that.
But please bear with us while we're scaling up.

If you want to ask about whether a PR is consistent with our short-term plan
_before_ you put in the work -- and you should! -- hit us up in an issue.

Thanks!