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+= Contributing to Spring Tools 4
+
+Spring Tools 4 is released under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 (EPL). If you would like to contribute
+something, or simply want to hack on the code this document should help you get started.
+
+== Code of Conduct
+This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant link:CODE_OF_CONDUCT.adoc[code of
+conduct]. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report
+unacceptable behavior to spring-code-of-conduct@pivotal.io.
+
+== Using GitHub issues
+We use GitHub issues to track bugs and enhancements. If you have a general usage question
+please ask on http://stackoverflow.com[Stack Overflow]. The Spring Tools 4 team and the
+broader community monitor the http://stackoverflow.com/tags/spring-tools-4[`spring-tools-4`]
+tag.
+
+== Sign the Contributor License Agreement
+Before we accept a non-trivial patch or pull request we will need you to
+https://cla.pivotal.io/sign/sts[sign the Contributor License Agreement].
+Signing the contributor's agreement does not grant anyone commit rights to the main
+repository, but it does mean that we can accept your contributions, and you will get an
+author credit if we do.  Active contributors might be asked to join the core team, and
+given the ability to merge pull requests.
+
+== Code Conventions and Housekeeping
+None of these is essential for a pull request, but they will all help.  They can also be
+added after the original pull request but before a merge.
+
+* Make sure all new source files to have a simple class comment with at least an
+  `@author` tag identifying you, and preferably at least a paragraph on what the class is
+  for.
+* Add the EPL license header comment to all new source files (copy from existing files
+  in the project)
+* Add yourself as an `@author` to the source files that you modify substantially (more
+  than cosmetic changes).
+* Add some docs.
+* A few unit tests would help a lot as well -- someone has to do it.
+* If no-one else is using your branch, please rebase it against the current master (or
+  other target branch in the main project).
+* When writing a commit message please follow http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html[these conventions],
+  if you are fixing an existing issue please add `Fixes gh-XXXX` at the end of the commit
+  message (where `XXXX` is the issue number).