Social Contract

From Farsides Wiki

Legal disclaimer: A large part of this document is adapted from the Debian Social Contrat (Copyright © 1997-2006 Software in the Public Interest, Inc., modifications copyright ©2006 Xavier Antoviaque for Ryzom.org and ©2010-2011 Farsides). It can thus be distributed only under the terms of the Open Publication License, Draft v1.0 or later. The other pages of the website are distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The Debian project is in no way affiliated with this project.

[edit] The Social Contract

"Finding a type of association which defends and protects with all the common power, the person and the goods of each associate, and through which everyone, united to all, only obeys to himself, and remains as free as before. Such is the major issue which the Social Contract addresses."
                                                                              -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Du contrat social

We, the founding members of the Farsides project, have created this social contract to codify our commitment to you, the players and future developers of Farsides. We promise to abide by these values, and that the promises listed below will form the philosophy behind the project.

[edit] 1. We will be open and transparent

We will hold conversations in an open and transparent way, involving everyone in the community as much as possible and avoid taking decisions behind closed doors. We recognize that everyone in the community should have the opportunity to get involved in the construction of the game.

[edit] 2. All materials produced by the project will be and remain 100% Free Software

To tell if a work, a source code or data is Free Software, we refer to the « Principles of Free Software according to Debian. We promise that the game, software and all its components, including it source code, its data (except personal or private data), its tools will be free according to these principles; we will mainly use the GNU Affero General Public License v3, the GNU Free Documentation License without any invariant sections for the texts and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike for 2D/3D/artwork/leveldesign data and we will help the people who create and use both Free Software and non Free Software works linked to software we produce. We won't make the game rely on proprietary software when there is a free software alternative of similar quality, and we will help the works willing to delete such dependencies when they couldn't have been avoided. Note: For strategical reasons, we may however have to release the graphical assets on specific projects under a non-free license, such as the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. We'll try to limit those cases to a minimum, and in all cases the software itself will be free software.

[edit] 3. The studio that operates the project online is a member of the community

A company - thereafter, the studio - will be in charge of funding some tasks of the project and operating the game online. The founding members of the project are also founders of this studio. The studio being a member of the community, it abides by the same rules.

[edit] 4. The studio will run an honest business

The founding members consider that building a profitable company is an important objective, allowing the project to grow and contributors to work full time on it. But it needs to be done right, and avoid the double dealing that generates anti-social behaviors in companies. Through transparency and community-building, we want to induce all stakeholders (players, contributors, studio, contractors...) to reveal their true expectations and preferences, and find solutions that are practical and efficient for all involved parties.

[edit] 5. We will give back to the community

When we will produce new components of the game, we will publish them under a Free Software licence compatible with the Debian definition. We will make the best game we can, to have the Free Software works being spread as much as possible. We will communicate things such as bug fixes, improvements and user requests to the "upstream" authors of works included in our system.

[edit] 6. We won't hide problems

We will keep our entire bug report database open for public view at all times. Reports that people file online will promptly become visible to others - the two only exceptions are support requests where the person who filled the request didn't agree to make his request public, and security issues before the fix is released. Security issues will be dealt with quickly, and be fully disclosed as soon as a fix has been released. When a technical issue will happen, we will quickly publish details about it, and explain the causes - all of them.

[edit] 7. Our priorities will be the players and the community

We will be guided by the needs of the players and the community at large (gaming, free software...). We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support efforts that help players to play in as many different kinds of computing environments as possible. We will not object to non-free works that are intended to be used with Farsides, though the studio may charge a fee to people who create or use such works if they want to operate the rest of the project software under a non-free license. We will allow others to create game servers and use its data (everything which is not personal or related to the brand - the design and leveldesign can be reused, but not the players data, or the game name/logo owned by the studio), without any fee from us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated game of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system.

[edit] 8. We will run a popular meritocracy

We want to create equal chances for all contributors and players to participate to the project, according to the merits of their work, and recognize high quality contributions. We want to make sure, however, that the decisions we take have the whole community's best interests at heart, so we will try to foster consensus-based decisions. When it is not possible, the Benevolent Dictators will take a decision, basing it on the majority's opinion as often as possible, while still taking into account the minorities' opinions and objections.

[edit] 9. The players' data will be the property of their respective players

We consider the data of a player, located on one of the studio's servers as the property of the player who created it, and we will allow people to download it (for example to create a copy on another server), and also to delete it.

[edit] 10. The studio will respect the users privacy

We recognize that privacy is an important concern for online games, and the studio will take precautions to protect the personal data that is hosted on its servers. Also, we won't communicate it to other parties without consent - and will certainly not resell them!