Social contract | General | Forum

This is one of the things we will need to have well sorted out before we go too public.  At the moment this document has been roundly ignored – and fairly enough because we've had technical work to do, which is a lot more fun.  But now the time is here to sort this out a bit.

Important issues:

• What is our stance on the use of open source software?  Obviously the most ideologically pure stance would be to make a strong claim along the lines of what is already there: "All official CSTART files used in the design and construction of our missions and spacecraft will be in formats which can be viewed and modified using software which is "free and open source" (The FSF's definition will probably work). This will apply to CAD files, spreadsheets, etc.".  The biggest potential problem here is that we may actually cripple our efforts if this strict stance means we cannot use adequate tools.  I don't know enough about the relevant parts of the free software landscape to judge how likely this is.  As a practical note, google's SketchUp has been a great boon to us so far – but it is not free (as in freedom) and with a strict stance like this we would have to stop.
• We need to choose an actual license under which to make available all our images/video/plans, etc.  Someone somewhere suggested a Creative Commons license, and I am inclined to think this is a good idea.  There are a few of them available.  To me, an Attribution-NoCommercial license seems like the best bet – people can effectively do whatever they want with our work as long as (i) they attribute CSTART as the original source and (ii) they don't make money off of it.  We may want to include a Sharealike option (the presence or absence of Sharealike is like the GPL or BSD license in the software world).  Some people are touchy about this issue.  In general terms I don't like Sharealike (I BSD license all the free software I write), but I would not consider it so inappropriate in this stance since we are an organisation with a particular goal/agenda to push, which may be better served by Sharealike.
• We need to think about how we can make sure this license actually ends up on anything.  Merely posting something on our forums doesn't give us any kind of control over it, the person who creates the work has to explicitly transfer the copyright to us.  Simply putting a terms of use agreement on the forum wouldn't work here because we want people to be able to put pictures they don't create on the forums (like of Copenhagen Suborbital's designs).  The best thing I can come up with is that we have our own file hosting service with a clear terms of use saying that anything uploaded there becomes property of CSTART.  There would be some work involved in setting this up.  That said, we will need to do something like this for videos, anyway.  Presumably the YouTube account is going to be managed by a single person (our Communications Officer, as discussed elsewhere).  Random people who film their small scale hybrid test burns etc. are going to want to be able to get those videos on CSTART's youtube channel, so we need a way for them to upload them somewhere where our Comms officer can (i) make sure they are appropriate (ii) maybe put a brief 5 second display of our logo and URL at the start that then fades into their video.  This upload process can also have a terms of use making it clear that they are trasnferring copyright.  This sounds like a lot of infrastructure to set up on our own, perhaps we could find existing services that are appropriate to use, at least as interim solutions?
• We need to decide on an official license for software (GPL would probably be best) and come up with a hosting solution.  Once again, this would be a bit of work to set up so perhaps at least initially we should use an existing service for hosting code repositories.
• We need to figure out exactly what our policy is with regards to patenting.
• Do we want to put something in their explicitly prohibiting research with obvious military applications?
• Any other ideas at all?

I think we should aim to have a final version of this document locked on the Wiki by the end of this week.  This feels realistic to me.

Luke Maurits said:

Important issues:

• What is our stance on the use of open source software?  Obviously the most ideologically pure stance would be to make a strong claim along the lines of what is already there: "All official CSTART files used in the design and construction of our missions and spacecraft will be in formats which can be viewed and modified using software which is "free and open source" (The FSF's definition will probably work). This will apply to CAD files, spreadsheets, etc.".  The biggest potential problem here is that we may actually cripple our efforts if this strict stance means we cannot use adequate tools.  I don't know enough about the relevant parts of the free software landscape to judge how likely this is.  As a practical note, google's SketchUp has been a great boon to us so far – but it is not free (as in freedom) and with a strict stance like this we would have to stop.

We should keep this as open as possible. I believe this should be "All official CSTART files used in the design and construction of our missions and spacecraft will be in formats which can be viewed and modified using software which is "either free and/or preferrably open source"

Luke Maurits said:

• We need to choose an actual license under which to make available all our images/video/plans, etc.  Someone somewhere suggested a Creative Commons license, and I am inclined to think this is a good idea.  There are a few of them available.  To me, an Attribution-NoCommercial license seems like the best bet – people can effectively do whatever they want with our work as long as (i) they attribute CSTART as the original source and (ii) they don't make money off of it.  We may want to include a Sharealike option (the presence or absence of Sharealike is like the GPL or BSD license in the software world).  Some people are touchy about this issue.  In general terms I don't like Sharealike (I BSD license all the free software I write), but I would not consider it so inappropriate in this stance since we are an organisation with a particular goal/agenda to push, which may be better served by Sharealike.

The suggestion by brmj is a good one. We should opt for a dual licence as he suggested.

Luke Maurits said:

• We need to figure out exactly what our policy is with regards to patenting.

For now it would be better to just leave this open ended. We dont have the money for patenting nor a proper legal team. May be in future we can revisit this and change our stance with letting the community vote.

Luke Maurits said:

• Do we want to put something in their explicitly prohibiting research with obvious military applications?

This I am not sure of.

I think we all realise you are not trying to be negative.  It is important to sort this issue out.

As for BRL-CAD, one of our new members, who has experience with a few proprietary CAD systems, has downloaded BRL-CAD and seems  keen to give it a try.  Hopefully we'll have some idea of how good it is soon.

As for Photoshop, I guess the person who can answer this best is Rizwan, since he is our main graphics guy.  Rizwan, how do you feel about Gimp?  To be honest, I'm not too concerned about using Photoshop to create our logos, etc.  I think the main motivation in trying to put a clause about this was to make sure the technical, substantive work we produced, like CAD files, etc. was readily accessible and modifiable.  For logos etc. I think it is enough that they be under a permissive license (aside: maybe our logo should be under a non-derivative works license), the creation software is no big deal.

As for Ansys, can I ask: are you a fan of it because you have used a wide range of FEA software, including open source options, and you think Ansys is the best, or are you just a fan because you have been taught how to use it as part of your degree and you are comfortable with its use?

It seems like for the time being we should avoid saying anything about software restrictions.  As long as we write our bylaws appropriately it will be possible to periodically review the social contract, so we can add a clause about this later once we feel comfotable with its ramifications.

For now it should be sufficient to strictly require that our files themselves are available under a CC license and to just express a strong preference for file formats which can be worked on using free (in either sense) software, without actually requiring this. 

To some extent, natural selection will help us out here.  If two people post CAD files in different formats, one of which can be modified by software that is easy to get (free as in libre) and one cannot (super expensive proprietary CAD format), the number of people who can make useful modifications to the first one will be greater than those who can do so to the second.  The first design will progress faster than the second, which may end up being left behind.

If there are no objections to this stance, I'll update the Wiki.

I have done almost a complete rewrite of the social contract Wiki page.  I would really appreciate people taking the time to give it a thorough read over and offer suggestions.

I think this version is a little more forgiving on our use of non-free software than the first version, but also a little more precise in that it explicitly identifies licenses and definitions.  There's also some new stuff that I think will help make sure we give of an image of being "good guys" and which people will find non-controversial.

There is still some work to be done, I put this together in a slight hurry.  It would still be good to:

• Talk more about brmj's dual licensing proposition (do we want to charge companies a reasonable fee to license our work under a license which allows commercial use?) and put it in there.
• Make some things less vague – e.g. the statement about not including chemically or biologically hazardous substances could use some clarification – arguably any rocket is chemically hazardous to some extent, but there is a real difference between, e.g. N2O and paraffin and hydrazine.  It's really nasty stuff like that we want to pledge to avoid.  As an aside, I did not include "nuclear" in this list, as some might expect, because I didn't want us to rule out the possibility of using small nuclear power solutions in future missions (not CLLARE, but missions which last a lot longer), since I feel that, contrary to uneducated public hysteria, this can be made safe.
• Include some sort of preamble which clarifies that this is not supposed to be a literal, legally binding contract, but rather an attempt to codify the general spirit and ideology of CSTART, which we will make a good faith effort to stick to, but which sometimes we may not be able to follow right down to the letter for practical or legal reasons.

Nevertheless, I think this is a significant improvement.

I wanted to put something in there about us not engaging in animal testing, by which I meant that we wouldn't be testing our manned spacecraft by firing cats, dogs and monkeys into space like the US and USSR both did during the first space race – but I thought it may be hard to write a succinct clause which stops us from doing this without ruling out the possibility of later doing proper scientific research using insects or the like, which we may want to consider.  We can always make ammendments later, anyway, if we define a procedure for doing so in the bylaws.

It is hard to specify decent safety criteria when there is rocket fuel involved.  Obviously there is always going to be some degree of fire and explosion risk.    Ideally, it would be nice if we could guarantee that if there was, say, a fuel leak at a launch site, or an explosion near to earth where stuff rained down on people, or one of our rockets somehow accidentally landed in someones back yard, people involved could be confident that at worst they are going to get burned.  There should be no question of people being poisoned, turning blind, getting cancer, that sort of thing.