Legal

Last Updated: October 2020

Terms of Service

This agreement is between fosshost.org (“the provider”, “we”, “fosshost”, “our”, “us”) and You (“your project”, "project", “your”, “end user”, “user”, “users”) and the terms herein are mutually binding and enforceable.

You should keep a copy of this agreement for your records as it contains important information which you may need to refer to now or in the future. It is not our responsibility to provide duplicate copies of such agreements. By using our services you agree to the clauses herein.

Our service is free and provided with absolutely no warranty. In other words, it can be retracted at any time. You should take the time to explore our official support channels for obtaining support to maximize the potential of our service, including subscribing to network announcements and maintenance notifications.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise and agreed in writing, the service we offer is unmanaged, therefore you should take the effort to ensure that your service is maintained to robust levels, by ensuring that it is adequately secure and protected. We do not provide hardware firewalls which means that your service will be accessible via the public internet and susceptible to potential attacks, not but limited to, brute force, DDoS or other such malicious or illegal activity. We recommend using software firewalls, where possible.

We will always take best endeavors to ensure that any prolonged and regular targeted attacks are null routed at network level, however due to the service being run by volunteers, this may not always be immediate, thus you should carefully consider whether the service we offer, is suitable for your needs. It may be appropriate to temporarily suspend, or terminate the service we provide to you to prevent further such attacks, not but at least to prevent further disruption to other projects we support. In some cases, our hosting sponsors and network carriers may null route IP activity without prior warning to either us or you.

We regularly review service to ensure that it is being used actively and to ensure that it is aligned with our values and your needs, which is providing hosting to open source projects. Any attempts to use the service for purposes other than this or inactivity and we reserve the right to terminate your service. Where possible, we will provide notice, but this may not always be possible.

If you are using our services for illegal, criminal, fraudulent, malicious, unfriendly, perverse, spamming, nefarious or other unwanted activity we will terminate your service, without notice.

By using our service you agree that your data may be accessed by a third party such as law enforcement, authorities and other government organisations, if required, not but limited to, reasons including terrorism, warfare, national security, criminal investigations, fraud or any reason, required by law. We will cooperate with such investigations. You agree to our Privacy Policy.

We do not perform offsite backups of your data, it is your responsibility to take your own backups, unless explicitly stated otherwise and agreed in writing.

We reserve the right to amend our service at any time, without notice.

We reserve the right to disconnect your service at any time, without notice.

We are not liable for any data loss.

We allow IRC on our network.

We are not responsible for loss or claims or punitive damages. We will rigorously defend such claims.

We will proactively, where possible, communicate any and all scheduled maintenance, incidents or other service impacting incidents or issues that will affect or impact our ability to deliver a reliable service. You should ensure that you sign up to our mailing list and participate in our communication channels for early warning indicators of any such matters.

From time to time, we may temporarily restrict or suspend any new applications for services, as our capacity is not infinite.

Our hosting supporters may, without notice, withdraw their support to the project, resulting in immediate loss of service. We will take every effort to ensure that we provide alternative hosting if this occurs with as much notice as possible.

Exclusion of Liability

We are not responsible or liable in any manner for any user generated content. Although we include strict provisions regarding user generated content in the terms of service, we do not control and are not responsible for what users store, publish, share, host or circulate using our services and are not responsible for any offensive, inappropriate, obscene, unlawful, infringing or otherwise objectionable or illegal user generated content you may encounter on our sites or in connection with your use of our sites.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable laws we, on behalf of our board of directors, officers, volunteers, agents, suppliers, licencors and service providers, exclude and disclaim liability for any losses and expenses of whatever nature and howsoever arising including, without limitation, any direct, indirect, general, special, punitive, incidental or consequential damages, loss of use, loss of data, loss caused by a virus, loss of income, or profit, loss of or damage to property, claims of third parties, or other losses of any kind or character, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages or losses, arising out of or in connection with the use of the sites or any web site with which they are linked, or any merchandise available on our sites. You assume total responsibility for establishing such procedures for data backup and virus checking as you consider necessary. This limitation of liability applies whether the alleged is based on contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability or any other basis.

Neither us or you will be in violation of the agreement if the failure to perform the obligation is due to an event beyond our control, such as significant failure of a part of the power grid, significant failure of the Internet, natural disaster, war, riot, insurrection, epidemic, strikes or other organized labor action, terrorism, or other events of a magnitude or type for which precautions are not generally taken in the industry.

You should seek your own independent legal advice.

This agreement may be updated from time to time, and we reserve the right to modify or cancel this agreement at any time. Your continued use of these services after modifications have been made constitutes an acceptance of the updated terms. If you do not agree with the updated terms, your only recourse is to stop utilizing our services and to terminate your agreement with us.

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Acceptable Use Policy

Your use of the Services means that you accept, and agree to abide by, all the policies in this acceptable use policy. You must comply with the spirit of this Acceptable Use Policy.

Words defined in our Terms of Service shall have the same meaning in this Acceptable Use Policy.

Prohibited uses

You may use our site or the services we provide only for lawful purposes. You may not use our site or services:

• In any way that breaches any applicable local, national or international law or regulation;
• In any way that is unlawful or fraudulent, or has any unlawful or fraudulent purpose or effect;
• For the purpose of harming or attempting to harm minors in any way;
• To transmit, or procure the sending of, any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising or promotional material or any other form of similar solicitation (spam);
• To knowingly transmit any data, send or upload any material that contains viruses, trojan horses, worms, time-bombs, keystroke loggers, spyware, adware or any other harmful programs or similar computer code designed to adversely affect the operation of any computer software or hardware;
• To send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use or re-use any material which:
  • is defamatory of any person;
  • is obscene, offensive, hateful or inflammatory;
  • promotes sexually explicit material;
  • promotes violence;
  • promotes discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age;
  • infringes any copyright, database right, trade mark or other intellectual property right of any other person;
  • is likely to deceive any person;
  • is made in breach of any legal duty owed to a third party such as a contractual duty or a duty of confidence;
  • promotes any illegal activity;
  • is threatening, abusive or invades another’s privacy, or causes annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety;
  • is likely to harass, upset, embarrass, alarm or annoy any other person;
  • advertises for sale substances that are legal in law but are known to be abused;
  • is used to impersonate any person, or to misrepresent your identity or affiliation with any person; or gives the impression that it emanate from us if this is not the case.

You also agree not to access without authority, interfere with, damage or disrupt:

• any part of our site;
• any equipment or network on which our site is stored;
• any software used in the provision of our site; or
• any equipment or network or software owned or used by any third party.

You may not apply with us or sign up or use our services for the purposes of testing or vetting security measures in any way or format without our express written consent to do so.

Resource usage

In the event the bandwidth, number of websites or disk space usage of your account presents a risk to the stability, performance or up time of our servers, data storage, networking or other infrastructure, you may be required to cease all activity, or consider alternative arrangements, or we may take action to restrict the resources your services are utilising.

Content

The storage that we allocate to you will not be used as a file storage method for purposes other than serving content for your open source project, and in any event may not contain the following content, not but limited to:

• Warez’ content or content commonly known to be pirated or illegal copies of software or other works;
• MP3’s or other audio formats of copyrighted music;
• Movie downloads in any format whether complete or in part;
• Pornographic material;
• Any content that is illegal under international, UK or European law;
• Image hosting scripts that allow an anonymous user to upload an image for display on another website;
• Banner advertising services for display on other websites or devices (commercial banner advertisement rotation);
• File dump/mirror scripts that allow anonymous users to upload a file for others to download;
• Commercial audio streaming (more than one or two streams);
• Push button mail scripts that allow the end user to specify recipient email addresses;
• Anonymous or bulk SMS gateways;
• Bittorrent trackers;
• Any script that causes a degradation in the performance of our server or network environment;

We reserve the right to serve notice to suspend service, suspend service, or remove any files which do not comply with these rules.

Proxy Services

Proxy services are often used to hide the originating users true IP address or location. Unfortunately this presents us with a number of legal and security issues and so accessing our services via proxy services is expressly prohibited. Where we find proxy services have been used to sign up for an account or to otherwise disguise the location of the account holder we reserve the right to terminate any accounts and services used in this manner without notice.

Personal Conduct

We will always do our best to be respectful and in our dealings with you and treat you in the manner in which we ourselves would expect to be treated. We fully expect that our projects will treat us the same way.

That can be a challenge sometimes for both parties as we recognise that things can sometimes get frustrating. Computers do have errors (often caused by humans) and humans also make mistakes from time to time. Whether those computers or humans are either yours or ours, we expect that both parties will remain calm and deal with any issues that occur professionally.

On rare occasions a project will become threatening or abusive. This can manifest itself in the use of all capitals in email (considered in general internet terms as shouting) or the use of abusive language.

On such occasions we reserve the right not to cease all communication. We do not need any abuse (the job can be challenging enough) and we will not tolerate it. If a project feels the need, do as we do – leave your desk and go for a walk. Breath. Talk to somebody and vent if you need to – just not at us.

Twitter & Social Media

We understand that social media is a great place to voice opinions, however it is also often used as a platform to berate and abuse providers and to extort them with negative PR. This is often to push them into giving people their own way.

Abusing us on social media is also something we have a zero tolerance against. We would not dream of abusing you over social media, so we do not expect our projects to abuse us. We understand that people may use it to voice dissatisfaction however we expect that projects remain civil and act with civility at the very least, as we will.

Abusive behaviour over social media may result in termination of your account. If appropriate we may also report offensive comments or behavior to the relevant authorities.

Suspension and termination

We will determine, in our sole discretion, whether you have breached this acceptable use policy. When a breach of this policy has occurred, we may take such action as we deem appropriate.

Failure to comply with this acceptable use policy constitutes a material breach of our Terms and Service and, in addition to our rights contained therein, may result in our taking all or any of the following additional actions:

• legal proceedings against you for reimbursement of all costs on an indemnity basis (including, but not limited to, reasonable administrative and legal costs) resulting from the breach;
• further legal action against you;
• disclosure of such information to law enforcement authorities as we reasonably feel is necessary.

We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of this acceptable use policy. The responses described in this policy are not limited, and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.

Complaints procedure

If you have a complaint then there are ways in which you can address them.

Your first port of call is an email to with full details of your complaint. You should make sure you provide as much detail as possible including a timeline of events if applicable, the details of any of our team that you have dealt with, or relevant message logs. In short, as much information as you can to help us conduct a thorough review of your complaint.

The complaint will be received and reviewed by a board member who will consider all of the information available and who may contact you to ask further questions if appropriate.

We will do everything we can to deal with any complaint raised and if we can find a way to resolve any issue to your satisfaction we will.

Sometimes things just do not work out.

Although we try our best, and although we know both ourselves and our projects have the best intentions at heart, things might get to a point where they are not working out for either party.

It may be that you just cannot understand our systems or processes or perhaps you cannot understand how to use things. It may be that we, try as we might, cannot satisfy your requirements.

Just as you can leave or choose not to renew your services with us without giving a reason we may decide that in everyones best interest and to avoid further anguish we will not renew your service with us.

Of course we really hope and will try our best to ensure that things do not get to that stage, however if they do, we will be sure to give you at least a months notice to give you a chance to make alternative arrangements.

Changes to our acceptable use policy

We may revise this acceptable use policy at any time by amending this page. You are expected to check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes we make, as they are legally binding on you and form part of your contract with us. Some of the provisions contained in this acceptable use policy may also be superseded by provisions or notices published elsewhere on our site.

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Privacy Policy

We take your data extremely seriously which is why we have this privacy policy to outline how we look after your data when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from) or when you otherwise provide data to us via other means (such as email or other electronic means) in order to use our services.

How we store your data

We use several systems to store and track the following data

• Your full name
• Your email address
• Country location
• Description of your project
• Your website
• Your public SSH key
• Your preferred cloud region

We cannot be held responsible if data is provided to the project, which is outside of our control, for example if your collegue or team member provides additional information.

Automatically Collected Data: We may automatically collect information about you when you manage the Services (e.g logs data) or visit the Site (for example through cookies). This information includes the browser or operating system that you use to access the Internet, your IP address, the date and time you may have viewed certain pages on the Site.

How we process your data

We process your data as outlined above to provide an efficient service; therefore, we may need to review all your personal / project information to make informed decision. This is done securely by our volunteers.

How we share your data

We do not share any data with anybody, unless we make a referral to another organisation that we work with, however this would always be done with your permission, such as occasions where we are unable to directly help a project.

If we are required to share your data because of a subpoena, legal request or any other matter where law dictates that it is acceptable to do so, we will comply and share any and all information pertaining to you as required by law. We will only release such data with appropriate legal orders which will be reviewed by our board of directors and a independent legal expert who provides pro-bono legal advice to fosshost.org.

How we store your data

All data is stored in encrypted and secure environments. We make it clear at every stage of the application, process and your time with us, where and how your data is stored through our site and communications. This data can only be accessed by authorised individuals. All infrastructure is housed and maintained within secure data centres with manned 24×7 security and CCTV.

You may submit a request at any time if you wish for us to provide all data that we hold on you.

We only retain data for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or reporting requirements.

We typically hold a backup of your server image for up to two weeks after notice has been given, to allow you to migrate your services away safely and in the event, you change your mind. Please note that after this two week period if no further contact is made – we will delete the server data permanently.

You can request us to provide a copy of all the information and data we hold about you. Please email privacy (at) fosshost.org.