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Clean Room Implementation

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Anyone wanting to contribute code to ZMK MUST read this, and adhere to the steps outlines in order to not violate any licenses/copyright of other projects

ZMK Firmware is a clean room design keyboard firmware, that borrows/implements a lot of the features found in popular keyboard firmwares projects like QMK and TMK. However, in order for ZMK to use the MIT, it must not incorporate any of the GPL licensed code from those projects.

In order to achieve this, all code for ZMK has been implemented completely fresh, without referencing, copying, or duplicating any of the GPL code found in those other projects, even though they are open source software.

Contributor Requirements​

Contributors to ZMK must adhere to the following standard.

  • Implementations of features for ZMK MUST NOT reuse any existing code from any projects not licensed with the MIT license.
  • Contributors MUST NOT study or refer to any GPL licensed source code while working on ZMK.
  • Contributors MAY read the documentation from other GPL licensed projects, to gain a broad understanding of the behavior of certain features in order to implement equivalent features for ZMK.
  • Contributors MAY refer to the QMK Configurator to inspect existing layouts/keymaps for keyboards, and re-implement them for ZMK.