Social Contract

From Flouzo

""To find a form of association that defends and protects the person and property of each with the common force of all, and in which each individual, joining forces with everyone, yet obeys only himself, and remains as free as he was before. This is the fundamental problem to which the Social Contract gives a solution."

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Du contrat social

1. Our goal is to test and encourage alternative financing means.

Numerous projects do not fall into investment funding or banking systems; the problem is deep: within the scope of mercantile logic, the human factor is scarcely taken into account. Financial intermediaries use financial profitability as their main decision-making criterion, concentrate decisionary powers and throw the relationship between creators and users off balance.

With Flouzo, we wish to set up a platform encouraging alternative financing means that bring people who act closer to those who use or support. Financial profitability can be a criterion; but it must not be the only one. By encouraging project holders to be convincing in terms of interest for the users or the common good, we are hoping to help bring the human factor into the equation. And, who knows, perhaps one day people will lend money to those who really need it...

2. The software behind Flouzo is and will remain free.

To define whether a piece of work, a source code or a piece of data is free, we refer to the Debian free software guidelines. We promise the software behind Flouzo, all its components, including its source code, its data (except those of a personal nature), and its utilities will be free according to those guidelines; only the logo and the name are subjected to use restrictions.

We will notably use the GNU Affero General Public License v3, the GNU General Public License v3, the GNU Lesser General Public License v3 for the code and the GNU Free Documentation License for texts and graphic data, and we will help people who create and use simultaneously free and non-free works related to Flouzo. The software will not be made dependent on any proprietary software on our hard drive, and we will avoid to be dependent on proprietary distant services when we have the choice (some, like banks’ online payment interfaces, cannot be avoided yet), and we will support works whose aim will be to do away with such dependences.

3. We will share our works with the community.

When we make new components for Flouzo, we will publish them under a license compatible with Debian free software guidelines. We will create the best possible software, so that free works can be widely distributed and used. We will notify the authors of original works included in our software: of bug fixes, improvements, users’ requests, etc.

4. We will be transparent and will not conceal the problems.

We will keep the whole of our bug-reporting database accessible to the public at any time. The reports the users submit online will be visible to others soon after. When a technical incident takes place, we will quickly publish the reasons explaining why it happened, without leaving out a single detail.

5. Our priorities will be the interest of users and of project holders.

Users’ needs as well as project holders’ will guide us. We will put their interest at the top of our priorities, without limiting ourselves to a particular community (including that of the free software!). We will answer the needs of users in as many different types of environments and situations as possible.

We will not be opposed to non-free works designed to work with Flouzo through a network. We will allow, without requiring payment, others to create servers using the software behind Flouzo and to use the data contained in it (except for personal data, name and logo). To serve these objectives, we will provide a software integrating components of the best possible quality without legal restrictions incompatible with these methods of use.

6. The data will be the property of the users

We consider the data of a user stored in one of our servers to be the property of the user who created them, and we will thus find a way for everyone to download them (to create a copy on another server for instance), as well as to obtain their deletion. Flouzo does not exercise editorial control on the content of the campaigns, each individual being responsible for what they do with the tools Flouzo provides them with and for what they publish.

7. We will respect the privacy of the users

We attach particular importance to the respect of privacy, and we will never allow ourselves to access a user’s personal data without their consent, except to generate anonymous statistics. We will not communicate this information to external entities outside of a judicial proceeding.