[Dev] [RFC] rewording the Social Contract

[Luke T. Shumaker]

So last night/this morning, I threw up a "Nomenclature" page on the
wiki[0].  The page is mostly meant to be descriptive, not
prescriptive, but part of its purpose is to standardize.

Then I looked at our Social Contract[1], and noticed that it is not
consistent with our nomenclature.

Following is my proposal for a new version of the Social Contract.
The format is Markdown.  MediaWiki's wiki-text sucks for email.

I've made it about the "Parabola project", not "Parabola GNU/Linux", and done
some copy-editing type bits.  Notes:

 * I use "Free Software", not "free software", and "Free" instead of "free" when
   appropriate. 
 * The exception to the above is the phrase "non-free".

Other changes I think we should consider:

 * I think that for the purpose of this document, we should normalize between
   "Free" and "libre".
 * We should add a bit about the Free Culture movement, which we sort-of also
   support, to formalize our stance on that.

[0] https://wiki.parabolagnulinux.org/Nomenclature
[1] https://wiki.parabolagnulinux.org/Parabola/GNU_Linux_Social_Contract

Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker

----

Parabola Social Contract
========================

The social contract of Parabola is a commitment of the project with the libre
software community in general and its users in particular.  It is because of
this that our social contract will always follow the philosophy of free
knowledge.  All the amendments to this social contract must be faithful to the
spirit of the [Free Software movement][0]

1. **Parabola is libre software**: Products of the Parabola project will
   follow the [GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines][1] so it doesn't include
   or recommend proprietary software or documentation and it does not provide
   any type of support for their installation or execution. This includes:
   proprietary software, binary only firmware or [binary blobs][2].
2. **Parabola and other distributions**: Parabola's objective is to support the
   Free Software movement so we only need to compete against non-free software.
   Parabola will strive to support other Free Software projects as best it can
   and any information from our project will be available for anybody who needs
   it.  That includes our packages and repositories.
3. **Parabola and its community**: Our community is democratic in its essence,
   so the community is included whenever there is a need to make a decision.  We
   encourage community participation in the development of the project.
4. **Parabola and Arch Linux**: Parabola will produce an operating system that
   is a Free version of [Arch Linux][3].  We provide repositories and
   installation images without any non-free software. We respect Arch's KISS
   philosophy (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and its development process.  In that
   sense, Parabola will always maintain retro compatibility with Arch Linux so
   as to help Free already working installations.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement
[1] http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob 
[3] http://www.archlinux.org/