The Acceptable Use Policy is a simple set of guidelines determining behavior in SocalLinux. The intention is not to restrict, but rather to provide the barest possible protection for members in order to provide a respectable and constructive working environment for the site. The AUP is as follows.
The following kinds of speech will not be allowed on the socallinux.org mailing-list or website:
No content violating the laws of the United States or the state of California or of any regional jurisdiction where a meeting may be taking place.
No Hate speech against individuals or groups.
No personal attacks (even in jest, which can often be mis-understood.)
No Profanity or sexually explicit content.
No off topic content.
This LUG was founded to promote the ideals of Free/Open Source Software and GNU/Linux. Members are expected to keep the topic of work and discussion in this area as much as they can. It is understood that the line between on-topic and off-topic is sometimes not too clear, and the benefit of the doubt will be given as often as possible. Only clear violations of this rule will be considered a violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.
The Code of Conduct is mostly an extension of AUP Item 1, as it pertains to protecting the group from activities which are in violation of laws.
All members of socallinux must understand and respect the following fundamental concepts in any group activity (mailing-list posting, irc discussion, web content on socallinux.org or participation at a LUG meeting.) It may be best said that if you want to break these laws, do it in your own home, on your own time, with your own property to avoid involving the socallinux.org group and site in the activity:
Free/Open Source Software, as well as proprietary licensed software, contains a license which members are expected to adhere to.
Members are expected to honor others intellectual property and not participate in illegal copying of copyrighted works. Intellectual property could be software or other media such as movies, music, books or other resources. Because some intellectual property has been provided under an open license does not mean that all property has been licensed that way, and does not provide a justification for participation in piracy of property or media which is provided under a restricted license.
Members are expected to respect other members personal property, and their privacy. Obtaining or publishing others personal information such as account names, passwords, ip addresses, system names, personal details such as phone numbers or home address may be only done with the implicit permission of the person who owns that information.
If a member wants to share or discuss technology relating to these issues, the demonstration must be staged and completely self-hosted by the member who wants to provide the demonstration. In general, the member is expected to understand that there are instances where the technology is legal, but the application of the technology may not be. There are some specific examples, listed below, but the rule is broad and applies to all demonstrations and presentations.
(Example A) If a member has a presentation on DRM restrictions in media, and wants to demonstrate technology which defeats the DRM protection, the demonstrator must prove that the source media being unprotected is original content authored by the demonstrator, and is not content which was ever previously protected by a valid commercial copyright restriction. The way to do this is to start with a clip or recording you own, place the DRM restriction on it, and then demonstrate the removal of the DRM. Any other approach exposes socallinux.org to legal questions involving intellectual property and piracy and will not be allowed.
(Example B) If a member has a presentation on computer security or computer privacy, the demonstration must be entirely self-contained within the presenters computer system, or a system which has been specifically and explicitly granted to be used for this demonstration. It is not permissable to run any security tool, active attacks, or other techniques on any system or against any person – the demonstration must be against systems owned by the demonstrator. If you really need to show an important demonstration to the group, run the target system in a virtual machine, and do your exploit only in a private (virtual) network environment. Any other approach exposes socallinux.org to legal questions involving the activities and will not be allowed.
(Example C) Since many technologies can be used for either legal or illegal purposes, discussion of technologies that can be used for illegal purposes must be done with legal examples. For example, BitTorrent is a great technology for distributing and providing access to content – a demonstration should cover using BitTorrent to obtain legal content such as an open-source or free software application, and not to obtain illegal content such as proprietary licensed software under a commercial license or commercially copyrighted movie or music content. Any exceptions to this expose socallinux.org to legal questions involving the demonstration activities and will not be allowed.
All members are expected to help maintain this code of conduct, including education of non-members who may attend a meeting.
It is the moderators duty to ensure that mailings to the mailing-list and content published on the socallinux.org website does not violate the rules stated above. Moderators will not edit members posts, but will instead unpublish a post and work with the author to republish a version that complies with Acceptable Use Policy and the intent of the group in general. Any member has the right to request monitoring moderation decisions. A public trail of the moderation decision citing the author of the violating post, the name of the moderator and the reason for moderation shall be provided.
The AUP and CoC applies to the IRC channel #linuxusers, with the following relaxed rules :
Exception on rule 5 of the AUP, as Off-topic content is more permitted in the IRC channel than on the mailing-list.