The BEAST2 project maintainers gladly accept help with the improvement of the software. However be aware that we cannot accept all suggestions for changes, even if you’ve already implemented these changes and are happy with them yourself. In particular, the maintainer reserves the right to reject changes that do not align with their vision for the project.

To avoid dissapointment, please follow these guidelines:

1. Raise an issue indicating the problem or feature you would like to address and wait for feedback from the maintainer.
2. Once the maintainer has agreed that they would be happy to accept a fix or a feature implementation, implement your proposed chnages.
3. Once complete, commit your changes to a new branch in your local repository, then open a pull request.
4. The maintainer will review your changes (please be patient) and either request/make modifications or merge into the repository.

BEAST2 is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.1. This means that you always have explicit permision to make any changes you see fit and distribute this yourself. The instructions in this document pertain only to contributions to the version of the software hosted at https://github.com/CompEvol/beast2.