Re: Proposal: Recall the Project Leader
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Russ Allbery wrote at some point:
> including ones that aren't even monetary, and the risk is present whether
> I'm being paid to work on Debian or not since it doesn't have to come from
> my employer.
Agreed.
> The solution to this sort of situation is, again, a matter of ethics. As
Agreed.
> someone offer me a bargain like the above, I would refuse it. Should the
> Debian project as a whole not trust me to act ethically, it shouldn't
> trust me with that sort of position.
Agreed. Therefore, since we don't trust AJ with such a position, we
are attempting to recall him.
> Debian). These sorts of ethical requirements are simply not that
> uncommon, and the vast majority of people negotiate them without any major
> difficulty.
I will note that several other organizations have codes of ethics, codes
of business conduct, and other formal structures to attempt to mitigate
such problems. I had never feared that Debian would need anything like
that, but the current state of discussions makes me doubt.
> The best thing the project can do to help with this is to work to avoid
> small points of failure and to put more people in a position to help
> should a conflict arise. We *have* had a problem with this, and I *do*
> think it's a problem. Ironically, release management is one of the areas
> where this is *less* of a problem....
I don't see how that's ironic.
> And, rather more to the point, are you comfortable poking this far into
> other people's motivations and conduct in their personal lives to the
> extent that you would try to analyze this sort of thing for any delegate
> and even non-delegated positions like RM? I find that unnecessary and
Firstly, this whole delegated/non-delegated doublespeak is irrelevant.
Everyone on http://www.debian.org/intro/organization (correcting for
those people who should not be on there but are, and those people who
should be on there but are not), irrespective of whether they believe
themselves to be delegated, is beholden to the Project, and not the
other way around.
Secondly, I have not bothered to poke into the motivations and
conduct of the release managers in the dunc-tank initiative, as (other
than politicking in favor of this travesty) I consider it largely
unimportant and largely irrelevant.
> rather intrusive. Surely, what we owe each other is ethical behavior.
> What arrangements we make in our personal lives to ensure that we can
> behave ethically are our own business.
I'm not sure I agree with that entirely.
On Sat, Sep 23, 2006 at 11:11:28PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I don't think I've seen any project with more than a handful of people
> that doesn't have a potential for conflicts of interest. Debian has
> certainly had that potential for many, many years already, and has been
> dealing with that for all these years.
Imperfectly if not poorly.
> We haven't seemed to have serious problems with that so far, despite
Either you and I have access to different information about this, or
we disagree upon what constitutes a serious problem.
On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 10:26:17AM +0200, Loïc Minier wrote:
> You list risks of bribes of various people working on Debian. How did
> this change with dunc tank? Are you claiming that dunc tank is a mean
> to disguise bribes?
I'm not sure that the risk of "bribery" is changed one bit by
dunc-tank's existence.
> I fail to see why the problems you describe were not problems two
> months or two years ago.
The conflict-of-interest problems have been problems two months and two
years ago.
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