Terms of Use

Overview

This web page represents a legal document that serves as the terms of use for the site Devopedia.org.

By accessing this web site, you are agreeing to be bound by these terms, all applicable laws and regulations, and agree that you are responsible for compliance with any applicable local laws. If you do not agree with any of these terms, you are prohibited from using or accessing this site.

We reserve the right to amend these terms in order to better serve the Devopedia community and its interests. The current document is dated 4th January 2017.

Definitions

We, Us, Our

We, us and our refer to the core group of Devopedia that maintains Devopedia.org and the associated infrastructure.

Visitor

Visitor is someone who accesses the content without logging into the site. Visitors may be permitted to anonymously like or share content.

Author

Author refers to anyone who creates and edits content.

Editor

Editor is an author who is also authorized to edit content created by others. By default, all authors are promoted to the status of editors.

Publisher

Publisher is someone authorized to publish a new article. Authors and editors can create new articles but they will not be visible to visitors until published by publishers. Only publishers have the privilege to unpublish an article. Edits to already published articles appear online immediately. In this case, publishers have no special role. Publishers are nominated by members based on their contribution and respect within the community.

Contributor

Contributor is a term collectively applied to authors, editors and publishers. "Collaborator" is an alternative term.

Reviewer

Reviewer is a contributor who participates in discussions on articles. Reviewers give suggestions or point out errors so that editors can improve articles. Moderator is an alternative term.

User

User is a term collectively applied to anyone who uses Devopedia. This includes contributors and visitors.

Member

Member is a term almost synonymous with user. Since Devopedia is a community of developers, this term is often used to acknowledge a sense of belonging to the community.

Developer

Developer is anyone who engages in aspects of engineering that deal with product or service development. This includes architecture, design, coding, testing, deployment, integration, etc.

You, Your

You and your refer to users of Devopedia.

Article

Article refers to a single web page that defines, describes or explains a uniquely named technical topic. Articles are the main building blocks of knowledge within Devopedia.

Content

Content is a generic term used to refer to the contents of articles. This includes the primary text and media (photos, videos, sound clips, etc.). Content also includes meta data of editor usernames, date of edits, associated tags, article status, etc.

Our Services

Devopedia is a community that creates and curates crowdsourced content. We enable this by providing and maintaining Devopedia.org as an online collaboration point for all members. We take care of the web site from design to development, from feature addition to regular maintenance. We welcome feedback on all aspects of the web site in order to improve user experience and encourage greater participation. We will coordinate with our infrastructure vendors to ensure that the web site is available 24/7. Should users face technical issues with the web site, we will strive to resolve them as soon as possible.

We will provide tools and resources for an enjoyable user experience. Some of these will help contributors track the latest changes in content. Users logged into the site will have a dashboard that summarizes their activities and contributions. There will be tools to prevent misuse or deliberate sabotage of the site's operation. Algorithms running in the back end will help in content curation. We will adopt SEO techniques to make the content more prominent to search engines.

We are committed to enabling developers to share their knowledge and expertise with other developers.

Disclaimer

Devopedia is an open platform that allows anyone to create and edit articles. Devopedia has no editorial role for crowdsourced content. Devopedia is not responsible for the content or any errors in them. All content is provided "as is".

While we have in place a peer-review system to ensure reasonable quality standards, reviewers and publishers volunteer their time and effort. They give constructive feedback to improve content clarity and organization. They are not necessarily subject matter experts. In other words, peer reviews at Devopedia are neither formal nor stringent as those you would find in scientific journals. Devopedia therefore gives no guarantee of accuracy and validity of content. Nonetheless, we trust in the power of the community and their good intentions in sharing knowledge in a democratic way. This implies that often you will find content that's accurate and reliable. For traceability, every edit is logged and tagged as pending a review until it's reviewed.

Any trademarks used in any of the articles published on Devopedia are only for the purpose of information. You may not use these trademarks in any other way. Their use is further restricted by our licensing policy. Trademarks belong to their rightful owners.

Article pages may display links to external resources on the web. The intent is to provide information relevant to the article. Devopedia is not responsible for the content of external resources. By linking to them, Devopedia does not endorse them.

Your Participation

You may access the site as a visitor without either creating an account or logging into the site. To contribute to the site's content, to review content or to participate in discussions on content, you will have to log into the site with a valid username and password.

You must supply your real name and email address during account creation. Alternatively, you can choose to login via one of your social networking accounts, such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn; or using your GitHub or Bitbucket account. When creating a username, for reasons of privacy, you may choose a nickname. Note that only username will be visible on the site. All your contributions will be attributed to the username. Your email address will always remain private. Your real name will be visible to others only if you choose to make your profile public.

Safeguard your password. Do not disclose it to others. You must not allow others to login to the site using your credentials.

You are welcome to participate freely in content creation, editing and publishing. Do share your knowledge and expertise in the true spirit of giving. Respect the freedom of others as well by allowing them to express their opinions. Listen to feedback. Engage in constructive criticism and discussion. Do not be afraid to differ and debate. In all interactions, be civil and polite. Seek understanding rather than confrontation.

With respect to content, do not falsify information. Do not distort facts to create biased viewpoints. Do not plagiarize content. Do not infringe copyrights, trademarks, patents or other intellectual property rights. Do not add content that's not relevant to the work of developers. When adding links to external resources on the web, check that the links work and are relevant to the article.

Actively look for gaps in the site's content and attempt to address them yourself or via community participation. Contribute by way of peer reviewing content. Participate in online discussions to improve the quality of content.

To give credibility to content include references to other published sources outside of Devopedia.org.

The first author who creates a new article, and subsequent contributors to this article, do not own the article. There is no ownership of content on Devopedia. Every member of the community is a potential contributor and has the right to edit an article regardless of who created it.

Respect the privacy of fellow members. Do not ask for their personal details. Do not attempt to use their personal details to harass or exploit.

Do not post content that's offensive. This includes pornography, violence, racist language, etc.

Do not attempt to hack the site to disrupt operations or to steal protected information. Do not indulge in vandalism. Do not attempt to post content with the intent of introducing viruses, trojans, worms, malware or other harmful agents into the site. Do not attempt to programmatically download the site's content in bulk. Do not attempt to supply account credentials that don't belong to you and thereby gain access to the site unlawfully.

Do not use the term "Devopedia" to refer to any other entity other than this developer community and its collaboration point Devopedia.org.

Our Privacy Policy is a legal statement that explains how we may collect information from you, how we may share your information and how you can limit our sharing of your information.

User Account

To benefit from the collective knowledge of developers worldwide, you don't need any account with us. As a visitor you may access the content without supplying any personal identity information.

To participate as a contributor, you will need an account with us. We may ask you information about your place of residence, education, etc. You need not provide these details if you don't wish to. Even if you provide them, you can choose to keep them private.

At Devopedia, we have taken the approach of privacy by design. Your user account is private by default.

You can export all data relevant to your account. This includes your chat messages. This doesn't include article content since content is typically authored by more than one author. However, metadata of articles for which you have contributed are included.

Data Usage

When you are logged into the site, information that's personal to you such as real name and email address will remain private. Note that your username will be public. All article content supplied by you, and your participation in reviews and discussions, will be public. Hence, do not share private information through these channels. All public information will be visible to search engines.

Devopedia will not sell your personal information to any third-party entity. We promise to store such information in a secure and confidential manner.

Devopedia currently uses only strictly necessary cookies. We currently don't use any preferences, statistics or marketing cookies.

We may publish the usage of Devopedia and the popularity of articles. Such information will be based on aggregated data and no account information, public or private, will be disclosed.

We will record your system's or your proxy server's IP address for analyzing the site's usage by geographies. This is also useful to fight bots, spam, malware and misuse of our infrastructure. Any analysis that we may publish based on IP addresses will be based on aggregated data.

We may disclose your private account information to law enforcement officials and agencies if required by subpoena, law, or other legal process.

Notifications

We will not use your email address to spam you with offers or advertisements. Your email address, like all other private account information, will not be shared with third-party entities. If we suspect a breach of your account, any form of misuse or violation of these Terms of Use, we may email you to seek clarification. We may also store such email correspondence for future reference.

When collaborators modify an article that you have authored or commented on, Devopedia will notify you by email. By default, you will get these notifications unless you decide to opt out. You can do this in your profile settings.

Right to Forget

You can delete all your data stored at Devopedia. You can do this on your own via your user profile page. Once deleted, deleted data can't be recovered.

Your user account will be deleted. This means that all account information including name, username, email address and profile picture will be deleted. You will no longer be able to login to Devopedia. However, you're allowed to create a new user account if you wish. The new account will have no association with your deleted account.

All articles or article comments you've authored or edited on Devopedia will remain in the system. However, the authorship will become anonymous. The deleted username will no longer appear with articles, comments, leaderboard or other places where usernames are generally displayed.

If you're part of the Rewards Program and have been paid for your content contributions, the payment details in encrypted form will continue to be present in the system. This is used only for audit purposes.

Licensing of Content

All content on Devopedia except software code follows the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Under this license, users are permitted to share and adapt the content, even commercially. Attribution implies that users must give credit, provide a link to the license and indicate changes. ShareAlike implies that users must use the same or compatible license when sharing derived content. A human-readable summary of the license is available from Creative Commons. The full license in legal language is also available from Creative Commons.

Software code published on Devopedia are licensed under MIT License. This is a permissive license that is short and to the point. It lets you do anything you want with the code as long as you provide attribution back to Devopedia and don't hold Devopedia liable.

Limitation on Liability

In no event shall Devopedia be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damages for loss of data or profit, or due to business interruption) arising out of the use or inability to use the content on Devopedia.org, even if we have been notified orally or in writing of the possibility of such damage.

Account Termination

We may have to suspend the accounts of users who do not abide by these Terms of Use. Even after suspension, account details will remain on Devopedia.org. This is important for acknowledging the work of contributors. In some cases, accounts will remain active but privileges as a contributor may be revoked. This may either be temporary or permanent depending on the circumstance.