Re: possibly exhausted ftp-masters (Re: Do we still value contributions?
On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 02:13:55PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> If we're only doing this for secondary
> reasons like legal liability, it might be worth looking around and seeing
> if other organizations with similar legal risks take the same precautions,
> or asking for legal advice on whether this precaution is legally necessary
> or if we're creating work for ourselves that exceeds the legal risk we'd
> be accepting by doing something more automatable.
Don't know what Red Hat family does, but at least Archlinux and Gentoo
treat the license checking problem in a very permissive way.
However, Debian is sometimes an important reference to these friend
distros when they encountered some problems about license.
> To be clear, it may be that we'll ask this question and decide that yes,
> detailed license review is something we consider important and we want to
> keep doing it the way that we have been doing it, and we need to figure
> out how to make that work scale.
Making that process scalable seemed like a workflow change, which often
takes centuries to enforce in this community. Even if that process can
be scaled to a larger group of workers, without proper tool every worker
node will still work in low efficiency (and still easily get mentally
bored).
Assuming "license reviewing is inevitable to Debian", someone must
manually check the debian/copyright file. In Chinese there is an old
saying "工欲善其事，必先利其器", which means "one who wants to get the
work done has to sharpen their tools first" (note, not a standard
translation).
So, trying to design a human-oriented tool for more efficient license
review should be worth consideration, at least. That's what my thread on
-devel is trying to do.
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