From ShortHike

Mission Statement, etc.

The following is a copy of the important part of Kai's post on the forum about Shorthike going open source, with minimal wiki editing included. This should probably be integrated into a new section of the wiki concerning development sometime in the near future. --Leyic 09:25, 5 Sep 2006 (EDT)

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Mission statement

The mission of ShortHike is to be the best space station game available.

Licensing

ShortHike is licensed using two main licenses and some supporting ones. The source code is released under the Apache 2.0 license, a very simple license with a low maintenance overhead. As the name implies, this is the license of choice for the Apache Foundation. The module and art assets are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This license seemed to suit our current modding and art practises best. Most sound files are licensed under a more restricted license, essentially only Mistaril can package and distribute a game with the sounds in them. You can read more in the LICENSE file in the source repository.

Committers and contribution

Committing to the source code, art assets and modules in the repository is restricted to Committers. Non-committers can still contribute patches, modules, stations, documentation or anything else, but they require a committer to sponsor their work into the repository. Every change must be reviewed by a second person who is a qualified committer, this applies to committers and non-commiters alike. Committers are further divided into two groups, unrestricted and restricted committers. From now on committers will refer to unrestricted committers if nothing else is specified.

Governance

Kai takes the position of Maintainer (read Benevolent Dictator). In case something substantial needs a decision, and the community doesn't seem to be converging, committers will vote on the issue. The maintainer reserves the right to veto any decision made. A special case is granting unrestricted commit rights where any existing committer can veto the decision.

Conduct

The ShortHike community is an open meritocracy. We welcome new members, constructive critique and dialogue. At all times, especially in the heat of argument, are we polite and respecting. We try our best to help each other grow and take on new challenges. Non-conformance with conduct standards will not be tolerated.

Infrastructure

Existing:

• Forums (http://www.shorthike.com/forums) - For user, modding, art and code discussions.
• Mailinglists (http://shorthike.com/mailman) - dev at shorthike dot com for programming and generic development discussion. svn at shorthike dot com is a list that receives all Subversion commit emails. announce at shorthike dot com as a low volume announcements list (not set up yet).
• Trac (http://shorthike.com/trac) - Trac is a project management and bug tracking software that integrates tightly with Subversion. It also contains a lightweight wiki that we will be using for internal code documentation.
• AnonSVN (http://www.shorthike.com/svn) - Anonymous Subversion repository for checking out the source code and binary Unstable builds.
• DeveloperSVN (http://secure.shorthike.com/svn) - For write access to the repository.
• www.shorthike.com - The website is currently checked in at /www/trunk in the SVN repos. Almost everything on the site can be modified, we are running on an virtual machine slice with full root access. The site uses PHP and the Smarty template engine.
• IRC #shorthike (irc://chat.freenode.net/shorthike) - IRC channel at FreeNode.net.

Things I want to get in but haven't had time yet:

• MediaWiki (http://207.58.178.122/wiki/Main_Page) - MediaWiki for more user and modder oriented documentation.
• WordPress blogs (http://www.wordpress.org) - Add blog support that is accessible by community members who are bitten by the writing bug.
• Tons of features for the site like mod exchanges etc.

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