Public Terminology Policy

ARSVIN public documentation describes engineering outcomes, protocol behavior, standards references, evidence requirements, licensing, and operational boundaries in neutral and verifiable terms.

Public content rules

• Do not use unrelated product comparisons, branding, UI, reports, or marketing language as feature requirements.
• Do not imply compatibility, endorsement, certification, approval, or equivalence with another product or organization.
• Describe desired outcomes directly: SCL-versus-wire comparison, continuity diagnostics, stream-health analysis, transmitter evidence, receiver evidence, and repeatable reporting.
• Cite applicable standards publications and public implementation guidance without reproducing protected standard text.
• Keep manufacturer-specific observations inside authorized evidence records and publish only synthetic, contributor-owned, or documented authorized fixtures.
• Record requirement and fixture provenance separately from product-facing language.
• Distinguish configured expectations, observed traffic, software interpretation, and external-device behavior.
• Identify evidence sources such as deterministic tests, simulator, loopback, isolated laboratory equipment, or approved commissioning work.

Claims requiring qualification

Do not use unqualified claims such as certified, conformant, compliant, calibrated, deterministic, real-time accurate, safe, secure, trusted, universal, production-ready, field-proven, or guaranteed.

Use scoped evidence wording such as implemented, covered by the stated test, observed on the selected adapter, laboratory-exercised, provisional, partial, unsupported, unknown, or not yet verified.

ARSVIN does not establish functional safety, cybersecurity approval, switching authority, equipment isolation, calibrated measurement, deterministic execution, or proof that another IED consumed multicast traffic.

Licensing terminology

• Current community source and current releases are GPL-3.0-or-later only.
• Historical Apache-2.0 references must identify the exact historical boundary and must not imply a current Apache-or-GPL choice.
• The commercial licensing notice is an invitation to negotiate and does not itself grant additional rights.
• Commercial terms can cover only rights controlled by the relevant copyright holder.
• Third-party components retain their own licenses and notices.

Automated validation

CI, Pages, build, and release paths run:

scripts/verify-current-license.py
scripts/validate-public-neutrality.py

These controls protect the current tracked tree and generated public content. Historical commits remain repository history and are not current product documentation.