Re: [Debconf-discuss] "Anonymous donation" to Debconf 13
On 03/12/12 20:01, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le dimanche 02 décembre 2012 à 18:31 +0100, Philipp Hug a écrit :
>>> AFAIK there was an offer of a huge "anonymous donation", which at the end
>>> seemed more a loan, and IIRC to speed up the process and not let discuss
>>> about lack of money. I don't know the source and I don't know if there was
>>> string attached.
>>> Anyway that offer endured only few days because debconf-team and localteam
>>> declined such offer.
>>
>> This is correct. After this was mentioned on IRC I asked about the
>> details of this 'donation' and figured out it's just a loan, accepting
>> some risks though, but with strings attached: The venue would need to
>> be LeCamp.
>
> Is this anonymous-donation-which-is-not-a-donation story related to the
> rumors of sponsorship from a large tobacco company?
In fact, it has nothing to do with the tobacco company. That is
completely independent. This thread is about probity (personal
involvement of team members in financial arrangements)
> It would worry me that it was even considered to accept money from a
It was discussed on this thread:
http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20121115.112828.29ea0d12.en.html
It is really important to remember that there are many companies that
some people will have issues with (e.g. logging the Amazon, testing
drugs on animals, hacking voicemail to get news stories, even one of the
existing sponsors has been mentioned in various controversies concerning
privacy) and I would propose that people with views on this send their
comments to the sponsors team private list:
debconf-sponsors-team@lists.debconf.org
Given the sensitive nature of individual sponsorship arrangements, if
people do express concerns to us privately, the sponsors team probably
needs to think of a way to consult the wider community on this without
wrongly focusing on just one company/industry because they happen to be
located near a proposed DebConf venue. Then some generic principals can
be developed to guide decisions about which sponsors are accepted.
But as pointed out above, the reason for this particular thread is not
directly related to the tobacco company. In fact, that is one reason
why this whole thing needs to be cleared up, so that such ambiguities
won't arise if there is some anonymous sponsor later on.
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