Introduction

These pages contain policies that relate to open source at Intersect.

See the glossary for definitions of terms and acronyms.

Goals and Principles

These policies are principles-based. That means that the primary content of the policies is a set of goals and principles, and the rest of the policy attempts to describe how to follow them. However, the principles are the important part - if there are disagreements about the policy then they will ultimately be resolved by appeal to the principles. This provides a guide to action: if the policy is unclear or misguided, act in accordance with the principles.

The goals are those stated in the Open Source Committee Charter. Briefly re-stated, those are:

1. Legitimacy: maintaining the legitimacy of the Intersect projects in the eyes of the community

2. Quality: maintaining the quality of the Intersect projects

3. Sustainability: ensuring that the Intersect projects continue in a healthy fashion

4. Citizenship: being good open-source citizens

The principles are:

1. Merit: authority and voice should derive primarily from merit

2. Transparency: decisions and discussions should be public and transparent

3. Delegation: decisions should be made at the lowest level possible

Conformance

The policies use RFC-2119 keywords to indicate the requirement level of various policies. We do not generally require capitalization of requirement keywords.

Because the heart of our policies are the principles, and in accordance with the principle of Delegation, many policies use "should". This means that projects and people can deviate from the policy, provided that they have a good reason and this action is in accordance with the principles. The policies are often aiming to provide a sensible default.

Similarly, projects and people are encouraged to augment the policies if they think it appropriate.

Policies stated with "must" are non-negotiable -- if you think you have a good reason to deviate from the policy, then please open a discussion about changing the conformance level to "should".

Changing Policies

Policies are not set in stone, and anyone can propose a change to a policy: simply make a pull request to the repository.

Changes must be approved by the OSC, but proposers should solicit community feedback before asking the OSC to approve.