Code of Conduct

Hyperic Community Code of Conduct

In an effort to encourage a healthy, thriving and productive community, we at Hyperic have drawn up a Code of Conduct for the Hyperic Community. Members of the Hyperic Community need to work together effectively, and this code of conduct lays down the "ground rules" for our cooperation.

In the Free Software world, we collaborate openly on a volunteer basis to build software for everyone's benefit. We improve on the work of others and then share our improvements on the same basis.

That collaboration depends on good relationships between developers and end users. To this end, we've agreed on the following code of conduct to help define the ways that we think collaboration and cooperation should work.

Ground Rules

This Code of Conduct covers your behavior as a member of the Hyperic community, in any forum, mailing list, wiki, web site, IRC channel, public meeting or private correspondence. The Hyperic Community team will arbitrate in any dispute over the conduct of a member of the community.

• Do your homework. While there is no such thing as a daft question, it will be helpful to you if you research your answer a bit before asking. Check the documentation and search the forums for similar questions and solutions first. If you can't find the answer, or still don't understand how something works - ask the question - chances are you may actually lead to us all learning something new.
• Be responsive. If you know the answer to a question please provide the information promptly. This is especially important for your own questions, as you are the one who will be the best judge and are guaranteed to be able to share your knowledge in solving your problem. It is also important to share with the community when your question is answered, and reward the people who helped you with points. This will build a great deal of good will for you within the community.
• Be respectful. The Hyperic community and its members treat one another with respect. Everyone can make a valuable contribution to Hyperic and its collaborative projects. We may not always agree, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behavior and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It's important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.
• Be collaborative. Free Software is about collaboration and working together. Collaboration reduces redundancy of work done in the Free Software world and improves the quality of the software produced. In order to avoid redundancy, keep the Hyperic community and any other ecosystem communities appropriately informed of your ideas and results. Your work should be done transparently and patches and plugins for Hyperic HQ should be given back to the community when they are made, not just when a release is distributed. Do not wait for community consensus to begin, but do publish your work in a way that allows outsiders to test, discuss and contribute to your efforts when appropriate for them.
• When you disagree, consult others. Disagreements, both political and technical, happen all the time and the Hyperic community is no exception. The important goal is not to avoid disagreements or differing views but to resolve them constructively. You should turn to the community and to the community process to seek advice and to resolve disagreements. We have our core developers and the community team, both of which will help to decide the right course for Hyperic.
• When you are unsure, ask for help. Nobody knows everything, and nobody is expected to be perfect in the Hyperic community. Asking questions avoids many problems down the road, and so questions are encouraged. Those who are asked should be responsive and helpful. However, when asking a question, care must be taken to do so in an appropriate forum. Off-topic questions, such as requests for help on a developers forum, detract from productive discussion.
• Community is a many-to-many relationship. We expect that everyone, upon first encountering Hyperic's software, will have questions about using and/or developing with the software. This is the natural course for any sophisticated, enterprise-level software. As we are a free-will community, and not a paid-for service, we cannot guarantee timely responses to every inquiry. However, as you grow with the Hyperic community and become more familiar with Hyperic's software, we hope you will share your knowledge by providing some level of community support for others. These users in turn, may help you some day with a new challenge you may face. This is the very foundation of a Free Software community. Those users who repeatedly request assistance, demand immediate responses, and otherwise abuse the helpfulness of other users can expect delayed response times going forward.

The Hyperic code of conduct is based, in part, on the Ubuntu code of conduct and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. You may re-use it for your own project, and modify it as you wish, but please allow others to use your modifications.

Scope of Community Code of Conduct

Web forums, wikis, blogs and mailing lists are an important part of the Hyperic community. This code of conduct applies to your behavior in each of these forums. Please follow these guidelines in addition to the general code of conduct:

1. Please use a valid email address to which direct responses can be made.
2. Please avoid flamewars, trolling, personal attacks, and repetitive arguments. On technical matters, the core developers can make a final decision. On matters of community governance, the community team can make a final decision.
3. Hyperic community support cannot be considered a substitute for our world-class support available via the enterprise subscription. If you require timely responses to meet SLA's, please contact an Hyperic sales or call 1-888-4Hyperic.