Re: A GNU “social contract”?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   Looking at the form of Debian’s Social Contract, its conciseness and
   clarity, I was inspired to think about a few points that would summarize
   GNU’s mission and workings in a way that would hopefully be rather
   consensual among maintainers (I’d like to draw attention to the six
   headings, not necessarily on the detailed wording.)

   Thoughts?

How is this different than what is already on the GNU web pages?  The
GNU manifesto, the GNU maintainer guides, etc?  This doesn't read like
a social contract, but more of a summary of what we already have --
that might be a good idea in itself but then we should call it as
that.  It is also I think already part of what is sent out to new
maintainers, so I am sure what the value of this would be.

   Proposal of a “GNU Social Contract”

   This document states the core commitments of the GNU Project to the
   broader free software community.  All current GNU package maintainers
   have agreed to uphold these values.

What GNU maintainers agree to is very small, it is only to follow the
policies that we have.  They don't need to go beyond that, which is
what "uphold" would imply.

   * GNU licenses uphold user freedom

   The GNU Project has designed software licenses to ensure developers
   cannot strip off user freedom from GNU
   software—[[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html][“copyleft”
   licenses]].  GNU software is distributed under the terms of these
   licenses.

Not true, we have programs licensed under permissive licenses.

   * GNU welcomes contributions from all and everyone

   The GNU Project produces software for anyone to use, but also wants to
   give everyone the opportunity to contribute to its efforts—be it as
   software developers, web masters, translators, speakers, system
   administrators, or on any of the many tasks that contribute to GNU.

   The Project welcomes everyone regardless of their gender, ethnicity,
   sexual orientation, level of experience, or any other personal
   characteristics.  The GNU Project commits to providing a harassment-free
   experience for all its contributors.

Why not link to the
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html ?  It would be
better to cite that, since that is what we recoomend.