#use wml::debian::template title="Debian Machine Usage Policies" NOHEADER=yes
Version 1.1.2
This version of the Debian Machine Usage Policies becomes effective on
July 4th, 2010 and supersedes all previous versions. It was announced
on May 9th, 2010.
In short:
This document contains two parts: policies and guidelines. The rules in the policies are binding and may not be violated. The guidelines specify rules that may be violated if necessary but we would rather one did not.
Idle connections are killed after an hour; this is easy to bypass, but please don't do so without good cause.
Mirroring via any private means any portion of the public archives from the private servers is strictly forbidden without the prior consent of the residing Mirror Master. Developers are free to use any publicly available forms of access.
Commercial web pages are not permitted.
You are responsible for the content of your WWW pages, including obtaining the legal permission for any works they include and ensuring that the contents of these pages do not violate the laws that apply to the location of the server.
You are responsible for and accept responsibility for any defamatory, confidential, secret or other proprietary material available via your WWW pages.
You may not advertise your WWW pages, or cause another person to advertise it, by techniques that would be classified as abuse if they were carried out from a Debian Account. This includes, but is not limited to, bulk emailing and excessive news posting. Such action may be treated under the appropriate DMUP as if it had been done from the Account, or as a violation of this DMUP or both.
If a Developer becomes unreachable for a prolonged time, their accounts, data and mail forwarding/filtering/etc may be disabled until they reappear.
Don't use Debian facilities in a manner which constitutes net abuse. Debian does not have any Usenet news servers. It may be that some of the Debian machines have access to such a news server, but their use through Debian machines is strictly forbidden.
Examples of what DSA considers net abuse:
Since many Internet users use a dial-up connection and pay for their online time, it costs them money to receive email. Receipt of unsolicited commercial advertising therefore costs them money and is particularly unwelcome.
It should be noted that a user has not expressed an interest by the mere act of posting a news article in any particular newsgroup, unless of course they have made a specific request for information to be emailed to them.
It is also forgery to arrange for any replies to the mail to be sent to some other user or machine.
However, in either case, if prior permission has been granted to you by the other user or the administrators of the other machine, then there is no problem, and of course "null" reverse paths can be used as defined in the relevant RFCs.
Due to the time taken to download it, sending long email to sites without prior agreement can amount to denial of service, or access to email at the receiving site. Note that if binary attachments are added to mail this may increase the size considerably. If prior arrangement has not been made, the mail will be extremely unwelcome.