Hyperbola Social Contract

The Hyperbola Social Contract is the commitment that we, the Hyperbola Project, make to the Free Software Community in general and our users in particular. It is because of this that our social contract will always follow the philosophy of free knowledge. All amendments to this social contract must be faithful to the spirit of the Free Software Movement.

1. Hyperbola is free software: All software included in Hyperbola follow the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines. They do not include or recommend non-free software, files or documentation and do not provide any type of support for the installation or execution of non-free software and if it is discovered to be included accidentally, Hyperbola will remove it. This includes:
   • a) Proprietary software
   • b) Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS)
   • c) Binary only firmware or binary blobs.
   • d) (Non-functional) data being published under non-free licensing
2. Hyperbola is free culture: All documentation and cultural works included in Hyperbola are free culture, with the exceptions of: works stating a viewpoint, invariant sections and cover texts. All documentation and cultural works created by or for Hyperbola are free culture, with no exceptions. We focus only on community-driven projects and software. Everything else driven by singular interests is foremost kept out as there can be no free and libre culture under pure orientation for those perspectives: There is no breaking of portability, ignorance for backwards compatibility and replacements of existing services, no enforcing into adoption with Hyperbola. The user is and will be always in command of the full system, as the freedom of choice and technical emancipation being essential for us!
3. Hyperbola and privacy: Hyperbola's objective is to support privacy of its community. It means Hyperbola strives distribute all software to be secure from global data surveillance revealed in the publication of Snowden's NSA documents. Hyperbola offers additional hardened packages which remove lower level protocols that may cause privacy leaks, metadata/fingerprinting, and vulnerabilities.
4. Hyperbola and stability: Hyperbola's objective is to support stability in its projects. They do not include or recommend software broken by design. To be broken “by design” means to have multiple security, privacy and technical issues reported to upstream and all of which should be proven to be ignored by upstream.
5. Hyperbola and init freedom: Hyperbola's objective is to support the Init Freedom Campaign. It is about restoring a sane approach to PID1, one that respects diversity and freedom of choice. Hyperbola refuses init systems that breaks portability, ignores backwards compatibility, and replaces existing services, forcing into adoption (eg. systemd).
6. Hyperbola and simplicity: Hyperbola's main goal is a minimalist system. The more abstraction-layers a software depends on and need the more complex the resulting system will be. Therefore Hyperbola rejects projects with adding more abstraction layers needed. According to this Hyperbola will not add complex frameworks or software without compatibility and porting-efforts.
7. Hyperbola and other projects: Hyperbola's objective is to support the Free Software Movement, so Hyperbola only need to compete against non-free software; other free software projects are to be cooperated with, not competed with. Hyperbola strives to support other free software projects as best can and any information from Hyperbola is available for anybody who needs it. That includes all packages and repositories.
8. Hyperbola and name confusion: Hyperbola does not include the name “Linux” ambiguously in its projects. Linux is the kernel, one of the essential major components of the system. The system as a whole is basically the GNU system, with Linux added. When there are terms talking about variants of the GNU/Linux system (often called “distros”) in Hyperbola's projects, it will be called as “GNU/Linux”. For variants of GNU with different kernels such as Hurd, it will be called as “GNU/Hurd”. Furthermore, plus symbols are valid too (eg. “GNU+Linux”). With “HyperbolaBSD” the project uses a new orientation and focus fully on BSD so there will be no parts of the GNU system left and only some added as further supporting tools.
9. Hyperbola and deblobbed kernels: Hyperbola includes “-libre” suffix for all variants of GNU system with any kind of deblobbed kernel that is going used and future ones in Hyperbola or any distro mentioned in Hyperbola projects. HyperbolaBSD is a full BSD-descendant operating-system, not a system-distribution per definition and therefore uses a different naming-scheme.
10. Hyperbola and anti-discrimination: All of Hyperbola community are to respect the ethics of freedom and free software and are required to show the deepest respect among themselves. Under no circumstances discriminate against people based on age, gender, sex, sexual orientation, disability, religion, social class, nationality, race, intelligence, or any analogous grounds. Hyperbola encourages freedom of speech always in combination with personal responsibility: Never think both are not combined. Our community is built on constructive discourse and netiquette. Ideologies and perspectives with roots in hatred, harassment and exclusion of groups or individuals based on before mentioned grounds are not welcome here. Please do not curse or use offensive language while debating within the Hyperbola community (all parts meant, including IRC) and try to be inclusive towards others solving also conflicts most friendly and diplomatic (respect when others state open their own accepted restrictions and do not try to circumvent them). Generic it is to await that minor conflicts can be solved between the participants. But do not under any circumstances attack, bully, stalk, or harass any individual (the personal turn) or a certain group. Play the ball, not the man. Any disregard of any of these points will lead to moderation by The Support Staff, including, but not limited to, temporary ban of the person(s) in question. Severe and repeat instances may lead to permanent ban if deemed necessary by The Founders.
11. Hyperbola and donations: Any user only donates towards the project itself. All donations will help the project as a whole and are appreciated for the further development of all system-components, packages and the infrastructure. Other possible uses for donations for example towards single team-members are not in any case permitted throughout Hyperbola as project and platform as this includes per definition a danger to end up in a fraud and would risk the reliability and credibility of the whole project. Any team-member taking personal benefits from donations on behalf of Hyperbola without contribution towards HyperbolaBSD will be excluded from the team without further explanation as donations should support and help the project and not the personal enrichment and advantages of individuals (to support individuals is nothing bad but has to be done aside from the project so the community can have a clear and transparent insight). We also have no interest within doing packages and ports resulting from questioning for dedicated applications, libraries or frameworks as donations stand for someone's intention to support and not for commisioning. Furthermore no person is allowed doing any personal enrichment within the communication-channels from Hyperbola (IRC, forum etc.).
12. Hyperbola and fairness: As the project is driven by democratic principles every community-member has the same rights, also including to ask for transparency. This means that when somebody wants to be part within the team gets a warm welcome. Nevertheless we don't need people with the search for only advantages or leadership, we need people with serious interest to work together with others under the principles of free, libre software and culture. This means also fair and open communication, direct planning together and problem solving based on top of the group. If there is missing interest for those values, a membership should be better left out instead having too much conflicts in the team and community. We also have no interest with empty promises to be mentioned, as we are tied in on our principles and mean it that way.
13. Hyperbola means responsibility: Hyperbola has a defined roadmap to follow. If you have some interesting proposal to do, please take into account and responsibility to do the task first on your own or ask around in the community for further help and / or inspiration. Please just don't demand something without giving also something back: This is the basic we are working on as Hyperbola is and will be always a community-oriented project.

Some amendments of this social contract are based on the Init Freedom Campaign and Parabola Social Contract.