pages tagged code-of-conductyakkinghttp://yakking.branchable.com/tags/code-of-conduct/yakkingikiwiki2016-06-01T12:27:59ZEnforcing your rightshttp://yakking.branchable.com/posts/enforcing-your-rights/Daniel Silverstone2016-06-01T12:27:59Z2016-06-01T11:00:07Z
<p>We have spoken before about <a href="http://yakking.branchable.com/posts/mensch/">being a mensch</a>, and about <a href="http://yakking.branchable.com/posts/getting-started/">getting started</a>
with your project. In the latter we covered how you need to ensure that your
project has a licence along with (ideally) a code of conduct or contributor
covenant of some kind. Having these documents is, however, only the first step
along the way of ensuring your users and contributors are protected.</p>
<p>Sadly if you're not on top of things then these documents are not worth the
bits and bytes they're made up of. You must <strong>enforce</strong> such things in order
for them to be useful. Fortunately if you pick a licence such as the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License">GNU GPL</a> then the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/">Free Software Foundation</a> carries some <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.en.html">article</a>s
about enforcing the GPL. In addition, the <a href="">Software Freedom Conservancy</a> may
be interested in helping you.</p>
<p>In addition, social contracts also need to be backed up with positive action in
order to ensure that current and potential contributors can feel safe engaging
with your project.</p>
<p>Your homework for today is to check over your projects again and ensure that
they're all carrying appropriate and enforceable licences, and where
appropriate social contracts, codes of conduct, or contributor covenants. Then
once you've done that, take some time to check any community you might have
around your projects for people failing to honour the codes of behaviour the
project expects and deal with them politely but firmly. Finally take a bit of
time to look around and see if you can see anyone violating your copyright by
using your project in a way not covered by your licence. (For example,
incorporating GPL code into something without offering the source).</p>