Looking at the form of Debianâs Social Contract, its conciseness and clarity, I was inspired to think about a few points that would summarize GNUâs mission and workings in a way that would hopefully be rather consensual among maintainers (Iâd like to draw attention to the six headings, not necessarily on the detailed wording.)
Thoughts? How is this different than what is already on the GNU web pages? The GNU manifesto, the GNU maintainer guides, etc? This doesn't read like a social contract, but more of a summary of what we already have -- that might be a good idea in itself but then we should call it as that. It is also I think already part of what is sent out to new maintainers, so I am sure what the value of this would be. Proposal of a âGNU Social Contractâ This document states the core commitments of the GNU Project to the broader free software community. All current GNU package maintainers have agreed to uphold these values. What GNU maintainers agree to is very small, it is only to follow the policies that we have. They don't need to go beyond that, which is what "uphold" would imply. * GNU licenses uphold user freedom The GNU Project has designed software licenses to ensure developers cannot strip off user freedom from GNU softwareâ[[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html][âcopyleftâ licenses]]. GNU software is distributed under the terms of these licenses. Not true, we have programs licensed under permissive licenses. * GNU welcomes contributions from all and everyone The GNU Project produces software for anyone to use, but also wants to give everyone the opportunity to contribute to its effortsâbe it as software developers, web masters, translators, speakers, system administrators, or on any of the many tasks that contribute to GNU. The Project welcomes everyone regardless of their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, level of experience, or any other personal characteristics. The GNU Project commits to providing a harassment-free experience for all its contributors. Why not link to the https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html ? It would be better to cite that, since that is what we recoomend.