I didn't want to have to write this, hoping common sense was sufficient, but some things I'm seeing from other projects make me feel I have no choice...
More rules may be added if circumstances require them.
Be nice to everyone - contributors, users, instrument vendors, and the public at large. Hate has no place in the project.
Give proper credit. If you use code from another project, verify the license is compatible with ours (in particular, code under a copyleft license such GPL/LGPL may not be contributed) and properly attributed. If you got significant help from someone developing or testing something, even if they didn't write any code personally, a thanks in a comment wouldn't hurt.
Copyright in the project is collectively held by all contributors as we do not require contributors to sign a CLA. The license header on source files currently states "Andrew D. Zonenberg and contributors" but may eventually be rephrased to simply "project contributors" or similar and is not intended to reflect the maintainers or other contributors claiming rights to your contribution. If you are the primary author of a new file being added to the project you may list yourself in the Doxygen @author tag, however the intent of this is simply to reflect "who to ask if you have questions about this code" rather than to be an exhaustive list of contributors.
Submitting un-attributed third party code is unacceptable and may result in consequences ranging from a warning to a ban from future contributions, depending on the amount of code in question and the level of deception involved.
This explicitly includes code generated by LLMs and other "AI" tools. Since determining the origin of the code in the training dataset (given only the output) is not possible, all LLM generated code is inherently un-attributable.
Knowingly submitting a PR containing LLM generated code in violation of this policy will result in a ban.