Community identity policy

Purpose

The Horizontal Front needs a recognisable public identity so players can find the canonical project and tell who is accountable for an official release. It does not need an exclusionary brand strategy.

This policy is a community covenant and a rule for project-controlled spaces and assets. The project is not pursuing patents or registered trademarks. It does not promise that intellectual-property or consumer-protection law is irrelevant; it chooses not to make legal exclusion the centre of its identity.

Canonical project

The canonical public home is thehorizontalfront.org. Official repositories, releases and community spaces must be identified from that site or from another channel recorded through the public governance process.

Only releases and communications approved through the governance process speak officially for the project. Control of a similar domain, account, package name or fork does not confer that status.

Uses the project welcomes

People may, consistently with the applicable copyright licences:

• Refer to The Horizontal Front truthfully.
• Discuss, review, criticise, teach with or report on it.
• Share screenshots and attributed excerpts.
• Make fan work, translations and adaptations.
• Fork and redistribute the software and cultural material, including commercially.
• State accurately that work is derived from or compatible with The Horizontal Front.

No permission or endorsement is needed for those uses. Criticism and political disagreement are not identity misuse.

Avoiding confusion

Forks and adaptations should make their independent status prominent and should not claim endorsement, governance authority or official status they do not have. When there is a realistic risk of confusion, use a distinct release name and visual identity while retaining honest attribution to The Horizontal Front.

Do not use project identity to impersonate maintainers, misdirect donations, conceal the source of a release or falsely suggest that modified content represents the canonical project.

These requests protect community accountability; they do not add restrictions to AGPL- or CC-licensed material. The project will respond first with clarification, dialogue and visible provenance rather than threats.

Logos and identity artwork

Original logos and identity artwork are cultural works licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless their asset records say otherwise. Reuse and adaptation are permitted under that licence. A modified logo must not be presented in a way that falsely implies an independent release is official.

Identity-critical artwork should retain the provenance and human-review safeguards in AGENTS.md.

Patents and registration

The project will not seek patents over its software, mechanics, formats or creative methods.

The project does not currently intend to register a trademark. If demonstrable impersonation or enclosure later makes registration appear necessary to protect the commons, that would require a public material proposal under the charter. Any protection considered must be narrowly defensive, community-accountable and accompanied by a broad public-use policy. Registration must never become a mechanism for suppressing forks, criticism, political speech or good-faith cultural participation.

Changing this policy

Changes follow the material-decision process in the governance document and cannot narrow the freedoms granted by the project's licences or weaken the project charter.