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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 "Free Ryzom Project", have created this social contract to codify our commitment to you, the players and future developers of Ryzom. We promise to abide by these values, and that the promises listed below will form the philosophy behind the "Free Ryzom Project".
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). 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.
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Ryzom and all materials produced by the Free Ryzom Project will become 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 Ryzom game and all its components, including it source code, its data (except the personnal ones), its tools and its extension the Ryzom Ring (R2), will be free according to these principles; we will use the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License for the code, 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 Ryzom. We won't make the game depending on proprietary software when we have the choice (Ryzom has several dependencies toward proprietary software, like Windows, 3DS Max, the sound library), and we will help the works willing to delete such dependencies when they couldn't have been avoided.
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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.
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We will not 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. When a technical issue will happen, we will quickly publish details about it, and explain the causes - all of them.
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Our priorities are players and free software.
We will be guided by the needs of the players and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of the players for operation 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 Ryzom, or attempt to charge a fee to people who create or use such works. We will allow others to create Ryzom servers and use its data (except personal data), 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.
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The avatars will be the property of their respective players
We consider the data of a player, located on one of our 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. Also, every player should be free to exchange its data (avatars, objects, tc.) with other players.
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We will respect the users private life.
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We will use the development methods of free software projects.
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Our organization will be a non-profit one.
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Our decision process will be based on participative democracy
We will elaborate, a consitution similar to the Debian project constitution, but applied to the development of an MMORPG, of the management of an universe and to French law. Noticeably, two main modifications will be :
- We would recognize, in Ryzom's case, that all the players are developpers ; after a completing a mentorship to ensure he knows the rules of the project, every player should be able to participate to the decision-making processes, and especially to the votes.
Not having completed a mentorship shouldn't be a reason in itself to prevent a player from accessing the game, and all the contributors to the project (founding members, until the rights have been bought) would not have to complete such a mentorship.
- The possibility to hire full time employees, who would complete work designated by vote.
- We would recognize, in Ryzom's case, that all the players are developpers ; after a completing a mentorship to ensure he knows the rules of the project, every player should be able to participate to the decision-making processes, and especially to the votes.