illiliti/respectful-software

Is your software respectful to its community?

Respectful Software

Is your software respectful to its community?

Since neither OSS nor FOSS define how to work with a community, any Free/Libre and Open Source Software can completely disregard and disrespect it. For example, if you need to contribute an important fix to said software, its owners can, but not limited to,

• force you to give up your personal information and then sell it to the advertisement company

• force you to sign a CLA, make software proprietary and then sell your work without your permission or any kind of attribution at all

• force you to pay for an ability to contribute

Obviously that this is totally unacceptable. The following guidelines is an attempt to fix this gap in the (FL)OSS definition, as well as encourage authors to make software with respect to the community in mind.

Refer to the RFC 2119 to clarify MUST, SHOULD, etc keywords.

1. Software MUST be (FL)OSS

• If your software isn't (FL)OSS, it is more than disrespectful already.

2. Software MUST be friendly to the community

• That is, there MUST be a way to contribute to it, report a bug and ask for a new feature.

3. Software MUST NOT charge contributors

• Contributors are those people who fix bugs and add new features to your software. In return, software MUST respect them.

4. Contributors MUST NOT be forced to sign a CLA

• A CLA is extremely harmful to the contributors since it allows code owners to change license terms at their own discretion. As a result, software could be turned into proprietary, allowing to profit from contributors work without any attribution.

• Instead, consider using the DCO which does not force contributors to give up their rights.

5. Software MUST NOT have tracking/telemetry without user concern

• Software that acts like spyware is disrespectful to everyone, or rather malicious.

6. CoC/Contributor Covenant SHOULD NOT be used to police community

• A CoC is usually enforced to ban people who disagree with political decisions that software maintainers make. Thus, software maintainers MUST NOT ban people who disagree with political decisions, or those who disagree in general.

• Even if your software needs a CoC for a good reason, it is still disrespectful to the community. It's a matter of trust. Do you trust and respect your community? If you do, then a CoC is unnecessary. Stop attempting to regulate anyone and especially enforce dumb rules. It is highly unwelcome to everyone. It brings no value to the development process. It makes it hard to communicate with software maintainers respectfully since a CoC indicates that they have no respect for the community in the first place. Keep this in mind if you're going to add a CoC.

• Instead, consider adopting the GNU KCG. Unlike a CoC, it covers very important topics, namely what to do in various complex situations and more importantly, how to work with a community.

7. Software SHOULD NOT be hosted on a proprietary platform

• Unlike open-source and community-driven platforms, proprietary platforms tend to exploit their users in various ways in order to extract maximum profit. Software MUST NOT be hosted on such platforms.

8. Software MUST NOT demand personal information

• Such as real name, address, phone number and so on. This information is directly attached to you and your real life. Thus, software MUST provide a way to not give any kind of personal information that can be used to track you down and harm you in any possible way.

9. Automation MUST NOT be used to handle contributions

• In no way automation, such as stale bots, MUST ever be used to close and/or lock bug reports or feature requests, unless resolution has been provided and reporter satisfied with it. This applies to the other ways of contributing as well.