Code of Conduct
Why We Persist in Maintaining This Repository
Many friends have asked me: Why maintain this repository? Why insist on precise recipes? What are the future development plans for this repository? Are there any plans for traffic monetization? I would like to provide my own answers here (@Anduin2017) and clarify the values of contribution.
We possess strong infrastructure construction capabilities. For example: We have a fitness app, fitness bands, a medical platform, a grocery shopping platform, a food delivery platform, smart refrigerators, smart scales, smart treadmills, and more... However, I always have to spend a considerable amount of effort coordinating and calculating across them. These infrastructures have very poor interoperability.
I once envisioned a future world where humans no longer need to worry about daily necessities like food and cooking. The question of what to eat would be completely resolved. Our daily actions could be entirely optimized by computers.
For example: If a doctor recommends losing 7.5 kg in 50 days, these applications would receive the conclusion from the medical platform and collaborate. They would design a fitness plan for me, automatically calculate the meals I should eat, automatically order missing items from the refrigerator, automatically avoid expiration dates, automatically calculate recommended meals, automatically track caloric intake and expenditure, automatically ensure the food is diverse, delicious, and meets my health requirements, and automatically adjust based on weight measurements from my scale.
This is an ideal life management system. It requires the integration of extensive infrastructure to truly allow people to stop worrying about daily necessities and focus solely on what they love. As for what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, how to make it delicious, how to make it healthy, how to meet fitness goals, how to comply with medical advice, etc., computers should handle everything.
Perhaps building such a life and health system is extremely costly and difficult to profit from. Currently, we still focus on problem-solving: going to the hospital after encountering illness, without any program truly managing our health.
Of course, we must still have ideals. I hope that one day computers will help humanity eradicate disease. By then, I hope my repository can serve as a reliable and powerful component in this complex life system, faithfully fulfilling its original mission:
To provide a sufficiently precise recipe database.
For additional feature development, visualization, intelligence, platform integration, and the food industry, you are welcome to reference the recipes in this repository for secondary development.
Repository Principles
Development principles for the repository: Maintain its precision, unify the format as much as possible while ensuring readability, and facilitate secondary development.
Weak License
I hope that commercial companies, restaurants, enterprises, or research institutions can reference this repository. Therefore, it will consistently adhere to a permissive license. It will serve as infrastructure, applied to more and more complex products and scenarios in the future.
Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute the recipes in any form, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes, by any means.
Formalization as Much as Possible
Formalize as much as possible, including standardizing the file format of recipes, avoiding imprecise units and operations (especially those that computers cannot understand), maintaining a clear directory structure, etc.
Many contributors complain: checking in recipes is too difficult and the requirements are too cumbersome. In reality, these recipes are not primarily intended for human reading, but are more likely to be processed by machines.
We must ensure that different people following the same recipe produce nearly identical results.
Non-Commercial
HowToCook will never insert advertisements, will strive to avoid coupling recipe ingredients to specific brands, and will prioritize the use of easily accessible raw materials.
HowToCook will never discuss monetization. It will always be maintained through community-driven efforts.
AI-Friendly
The community is allowed to use this repository to train any type of AI, including for commercial purposes.
Derivative Works
Currently, there are many mini-programs, apps, websites, and other derivatives based on HowToCook developed by the community.
The HowToCook repository has no partnership or obligation of knowledge regarding any derivative works. The code of conduct of all derivative works is not bound by the code of conduct of HowToCook, nor do they represent the values of the HowToCook repository.