Re: Enlarging the Debian Planetarium
Hi,
On Thu, 08 Aug 2013, MJ Ray wrote:
> And yet, the Debian Facilities are used to deliver things like, for
> example, a list of CD vendors which benefits both them and the project
> despite being a commercial action that debatably* isn't an official duty
> or function.
>
> * - that seems to be a can of worms, so let's not open it because there
> are many other examples of commerce in the project.
>
> Actually, it would be nice if DMUP could be updated to reflect reality,
+1
> which is that a lot of DDs work for commercial organisations, it would
> be interesting to know about that and sometimes help debian-supporting
> commercial activities. Anyone know why that "commercial purposes" ban
> is in DMUP and why it's so broad?
The DMUP has been written after a DD has been caught hosting warez on
his master.debian.org account IIRC. So AFAIK this was meant to cover
things like selling access to resources hosted on debian.org machines
or using debian.org personal account web space as part of a wider
commercial service.
I doubt that the interpretation that makes it cover self-promotional blog
post appearing on planet.debian.org was originally envisioned.
I really agree that we need to fix this to be less restrictive to avoid
that kind of abuse. I have been accused several times of not respecting
the DMUP because of that and I really dislike how the DMUP has been
used by parties other than DSA to (try to) enforce their own
(political) view on a topic that is definitely not consensual within
Debian.
We really should have a discussion with the DSA team to improve the DMUP
in that regard. If you would like to drive that forward, I'd be ready
to help you.
> I'd guess it may be due to servers hosted on education networks, but
> ac.uk seem to have gone more commercial over time, so do any we use
> still have such restrictions?
I'm not even sure that was part of the original reasoning. But it's indeed
a possibility. But the kind of commercial activity that might create
trouble is definitely not syndicating blog posts on planet.debian.org.
I'm ccing James Troup who was part of the DSA team at that time. Maybe
he can shed some light on this, on what was the intent behind the
non-commercial clause in the DMUP.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
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