Policies
The standards that govern the Haiku community are similar to the Unwritten Constitutions that govern some countries, where their constitution simply acts as an aggregation of other laws, rather than a standalone constitution.
These rules are not final, and subject to change over time as problems, potential improvements or issues arise.
Our policies are listed below in a summarized manner:
Communication
General rules
Users are to refrain from delving into discussions about religion, politics, and other similar subjects. Try to stick to vi vs. emacs for off-topic fun...
Everyone can participate, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, etc. Keep this in mind and keep the community safe and welcoming to all.
Be nice to other people. Avoid insults and personal attacks.
Focus on the quality and value of the discussions and contributions.
Respect the privacy of other people.
Avoid advertising your non-Haiku related project or business.
We reserve the right to moderate or remove posts of an aggravating nature, ban users from the forums and mailing lists, remove people from the development team, restrict their commit access, or take any other action that seems appropriate and fitting, on a case by case basis.
This statement does not override locally applicable laws, for example, some countries have regulations preventing collection of personal data for children under 13 year old, which may prevent full usage of our infrastructure or of 3rd party services we rely on.
Mailing List Etiquette
As with many other FOSS mailing lists, we at Haiku hold ourselves to a few rules when posting to mailing lists. For now most of the rules of Mailing List Etiquette are to ensure that all information is properly archived or to improve a message's readability.
On the mailing lists, messages cannot be deleted or edited once they have been sent, and topics cannot be locked, so think twice before sending one.
Bug Tracker Etiquette
There are a few social rules that are expected to be observed by all contributors of Haiku's Bug Tracker.
Forum Etiquette
The forum has more activity than the other communication channels. In order to allow everyone to benefit from it, please follow the rules from the forum FAQ page.
Reporting
In case someone exhibits inappropriate behavior, you are advised to report them to members of the Haiku development team. As an exception to the usual rules, you are allowed to contact individual members privately in this case.
If the behavior you witnessed took place in the Community Forums, you are encouraged to simply report the offending user or users through the forum itself.
As a last resort, please get in touch with:
contact at haiku-inc dot org
Trademarks and Copyrights
Trademark Policy
Haiku, Inc. owns the 'Haiku'® name, HAIKU logo®, HAIKU Background Leaf™, and HAIKU Leaf™ (registered) trademarks. As an open source project, the name and brand that is associated with the Project is vital to the Project's reputation and the sense of familiarity that end-users expect from the Software. Anyone is able to freely use the code that comprises Haiku, however the trademarks of Haiku cannot freely be used in the same liberal manner.
The Trademark Policy page on the about section of this website contains the latest policy revision.
Haiku Distro Guidelines
The Haiku project believes that having one distribution (the one officially released by the project) is the best long term strategy to ensure success of the platform. Therefore anyone considering creating a new distribution should think long and hard before doing so. The project is very interested in working with anyone who feels they need a new distribution to add what they need to Haiku itself.
The Haiku Distro Guidelines page on the about section of this website contains the latest policy revision regarding the creation of a Haiku distribution.
Software
Nightly images of Haiku
Nightly images of Haiku contain the latest enhancements, bug fixes, and hardware support. Please keep in mind that there may also be regressions and broken features in these builds which have not yet been identified or resolved. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Coding Guidelines
The information in our Coding Guidelines is extremely important. If you will be contributing code or patches to Haiku, you will need to strictly follow the code style guidelines. Code which doesn't follow these guidelines will not be accepted.
Some code doesn't match our guidelines in some places, this is mostly due to it being written before the guidelines were defined. Assistance with cleaning up incorrect code is very welcome as long as you notate in the commit that there are "no functional changes" in this patch (don't bury code changes in style fixes).