The Horizontal Front

Project charter

Purpose

The Horizontal Front is a free, open-source game about collective power, mutual aid, and resistance to hierarchical systems. It is developed as a digital commons: freely accessible, community-supported, and accountable to its players rather than investors or advertisers.

This charter is the project's social contract. It governs the canonical project at thehorizontalfront.org, including its official repository, releases, name, community spaces, funding and other project-controlled assets.

Protected commitments

The canonical project must:

  1. Remain free to play, without a purchase price, advertising, loot boxes, premium currency, pay-to-win mechanics or paid access.
  2. Distribute its software and distributable cultural materials as free/open-source work forming part of the digital commons.
  3. Avoid player tracking, behavioural analytics, sale or transmission of player data, manipulative engagement systems and artificial retention machinery.
  4. Remain accountable to players and contributors rather than investors, advertisers, donors or commercial platforms.
  5. Provide public, accessible ways to inspect development, propose changes and contribute.
  6. Treat accessibility, translation, modest hardware requirements and offline play as design requirements.
  7. Connect its satire to mutual aid, labour history, enclosure, collective action and horizontal governance through appropriate educational context.
  8. Use static, offline-capable delivery that does not require an account, application backend or permanent network connection after the required files have been cached.
  9. Disclose material sources of project funding and major project expenses. Voluntary support must not purchase access, gameplay advantages or control.
  10. Never sell the canonical project, enclose it behind a paywall or convert it into an advertising or data-extraction platform.

Decision rule

Product, technical, funding and governance decisions must comply with the protected commitments. Convenience, growth, funding, platform requirements and contributor preference do not override them.

Anyone may raise a charter concern through the public issue tracker. Work that plausibly conflicts with the charter must pause until the concern is answered in public. The maintainer must explain the decision against the relevant commitment rather than relying only on authority or intention.

Amendments

Ordinary wording may be clarified through the public governance process, provided the meaning of the protected commitments is not weakened.

The protected commitments may be strengthened but not removed, narrowed or overridden. A project that permits paywalls, advertising, surveillance, investor or donor control, proprietary enclosure, or another direct contradiction is a successor using a different charter—not a continuation of the canonical Horizontal Front project.

This rule governs the canonical project's identity and stewardship. It does not attempt to restrict rights that free/open-source licences grant to independent recipients or forks.

Licensing

Project software is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later. Original writing, documentation, artwork, music, sound and other cultural material are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 unless a file or asset record identifies a necessary exception.

The scope, attribution rules and full licence texts are recorded in the licensing guide. These copyleft and share-alike foundations may not be replaced with proprietary or non-reciprocal terms for the canonical project.

Status and precedence

This charter takes precedence over roadmaps, contribution proposals, funding arrangements and ordinary project documentation. AGENTS.md translates it into operational instructions for automated assistants; it cannot weaken this charter.