0012 — Contributor Covenant 3.0 as the code of conduct

• Status: accepted
• Date: 2026-09-06
• Deciders: @kalwei

Context

The repository had no conduct file. This project's audience includes people who work for the vendors it compares itself to, and people who run plants on spreadsheets; both are contributors the project wants and both are easy to drive away. Contributor Covenant 3.0 was released 2025-07-28 and is the version projects are migrating to.

Options considered

Option	For	Against
Contributor Covenant 3.0	current version, so no migration later; a template meant to be edited; recognised on sight by contributors	newer, so fewer projects to copy enforcement wording from
Contributor Covenant 2.1	what most projects still carry	adopting the old one at launch means migrating later
No conduct file	nothing to enforce	makes the project look unserious, and leaves the first bad thread with no rule to point at

Decision

Contributor Covenant 3.0, taken as-is except for two sections written for this project. Reporting: [email protected], acknowledged within 72 hours with what happens next; GitHub's own "Report content" is named separately so people know it reaches GitHub, not the project. Enforcement: the Covenant's four steps — correction, warning, temporary ban, permanent ban — each with a sentence about where they apply, and decided by the maintainers, which the governance page says plainly is one person today. Three things are said explicitly because this community needs them said: no employer or customer names, from anyone; no real plant data, ever, including in bug reports, because it exposes third parties; vendors are welcome and disparagement is not.

Consequences

Easy: a rule exists before it is needed. Hard: the reporting address is one person, so the 72-hour promise is a real commitment; if a second maintainer joins, the alias gains a recipient.

House rules touched

None. The no-real-data clause is the provenance rule in CONTRIBUTING, asked of everyone rather than only of contributors.