This Specification is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This Specification is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses>.
## Language
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
## Goals
C4 is meant to provide a reusable optimal collaboration model for open source software projects. It has these specific goals:
- To maximize the scale and diversity of the community around a project, by reducing the friction for new Contributors and creating a scaled participation model with strong positive feedbacks;
- To relieve dependencies on key individuals by separating different skill sets so that there is a larger pool of competence in any required domain;
- To allow the project to develop faster and more accurately, by increasing the diversity of the decision making process;
- To support the natural life cycle of project versions from experimental through to stable, by allowing safe experimentation, rapid failure, and isolation of stable code;
- To reduce the internal complexity of project repositories, thus making it easier for Contributors to participate and reducing the scope for error;
- To enforce collective ownership of the project, which increases economic incentive to Contributors and reduces the risk of hijack by hostile entities.
- A patch MUST compile cleanly and pass project self-tests on at least the principle target platform.
- A patch commit message SHOULD consist of a single short (less than 50 character) line summarizing the change, optionally followed by a blank line and then a more thorough description.
- A "Correct Patch" is one that satisfies the above requirements.
- Users MUST NOT log feature requests, ideas, or suggestions unrelated to Oxen code or Oxen's dependency code or Oxen's potential/future dependency code or research which successfully implements Oxen.
- Users MUST NOT log any solutions to problems (verifiable or hypothetical) of which are not explicitly documented and/or not provable and/or cannot be reasonably proven.
- Thus, the release history of the project MUST be a list of meaningful issues logged and solved.
- To work on an issue, a Contributor MUST fork the project repository and then work on their forked repository.
- To submit a patch, a Contributor MUST create a Platform pull request back to the project.
- A Contributor MUST NOT commit changes directly to the project.
- Maintainers SHOULD NOT merge their own patches except in exceptional cases, such as non-responsiveness from other Maintainers for an extended period (more than 30 days) or unless urgent as defined by the Maintainers Team.
- All Public Contracts SHOULD have space for extensibility and experimentation.
- A patch that modifies a stable Public Contract SHOULD not break existing applications unless there is overriding consensus on the value of doing this.
- A patch that introduces new features to a Public Contract SHOULD do so using new names.
- Old names SHOULD be deprecated in a systematic fashion by marking new names as "experimental" until they are stable, then marking the old names as "deprecated".
- When sufficient time has passed, old deprecated names SHOULD be marked "legacy" and eventually removed.
- Administrators MAY remove Maintainers who are inactive for an extended period of time, or who repeatedly fail to apply this process accurately.
- Administrators SHOULD block or ban "bad actors" who cause stress and pain to others in the project. This should be done after public discussion, with a chance for all parties to speak. A bad actor is someone who repeatedly ignores the rules and culture of the project, who is needlessly argumentative or hostile, or who is offensive, and who is unable to self-correct their behavior when asked to do so by others.