As a Team Member
It's pretty easy to join the team. Just send an e-mail message to the hummstrumm-user mailing list requesting a position. Unless you have any outstanding warrants against you, we will let you in.
Most of this game is hosted on Google services, because they are free and relatively unrestricted. To participate on this project, you will need either a Gmail or a Google Account using an existing email. We will then invite you to the services using your Google Account.
As a team member, you will have full, read-write Git access. We will make you a branch with your Google Code user name (the same as your Google Account), for you to use in development. You will also participate in code reviews.
We mostly use email to communicate. While you can email us individually, we prefer to use our development mailing list, hummstrumm-dev, which is publicly viewable, and archived.
Also, as a member, you will obtain a share of the copyright. We will add you to the authors list, which will give you an equal share of the copyright as the rest of the authors. In the United States, this is called joint copyright ownership. In your country, other laws concerning copyright may apply to you.
As a Contributor
You don't need to become a full-time team member to help the project out. We also accept smaller contributions. If you notice a bug and want to fix it, you can send us a patch with the bugfix without signing on to the team. In addition, if you want to add a new feature, we also accept code modules written by others.
The decision to allow outside contributors is a hard one, actually. We, as the authors, need to be able to protect ourselves from any legal action, so we have to own the copyright for the game. We also keep the copyright for the ability to re-license the code under newer licenses, like a newer, stronger version of the GPL (or the AGPL, if Google Code ever supports it), so as to keep the project Free Software. This need to keep the copyright represents a difficulty in accepting contributions from other authors, tainting the legality our copyright claim and defence.
Humm and Strumm takes an approach which gives us most of the rights of a copyright holder (including the right to re-license code, artwork, or other contributions) while still maintaining the copyright of the contributor, giving him or her full copyright claim, too. We have a specific license, found on our Contributors Policy wiki page for contributors. The full license text must accompany every contribution.
We request that you alert us prior to the development of any major contributions, so we don't start development on it yourself. You may also want to do that if fixing a bug, just so we know. We like knowing things. You can alert us via our hummstrumm-contrib mailing list (which requires you request to join at its Google Group page).
For more information on our contribution procedure, please see our Contributors Policy wiki page.
As a User
Even if you can't directly contribute to the project, you can help to spread the word around. Tell anyone you think will be interested! Write a blog entry reviewing us! Our greatest benefit is our users.
Also, subscribe to us to keep up with new releases. If you want to participate in our user community or contact the developers, you can also sign up for the hummstrumm-user mailing list through its Google Group page.
If you happen to find a bug in our code, please alert us by filing a bug report at our Issue Tracker. By filing a report here, we can fix the problem, and other users can see the bug and our progress on it.