On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 01:44:14PM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote: > Most of the current members of Project Scud appear to be employed by > companies whose primary business is Debian, or heavily depend on Debian > in their line of work: > [...] > Bdale Garbee, CTO of HP Linux who use Debian for testing and have > their own "Carrier Grade" derivative. You forgot myself: Enrico Zini as well, employed part-time by Canonical[1] until the end of February, possibly more if I find the time. > Was this intentional? No, it was not intentional. I didn't know the job of Steve and Branden before I read your message, nor some of the others did know I was working for Canonical. And I still don't know what's Jeroen's job :) > If it wasn't intentional, are you not worried that you could either be > influenced by your employers to direct Debian according to their wishes > or be perceived to be doing so? All of us (not only in Project Scud) we are influenced by something (our job, our partner, our employer, our users, the volunteer group we like to help, whatever). And it's perfectly fine for people to notice it. For example, I'm active (more or less) in Debian-NP because I'm part of some volunteer groups. And working at Ubuntu I've noticed that the Ubuntu Code of Conduct is a nice idea and I'm working at something similar for Debian. Since your question implies it could be a problem, let's see three malicious scenarios I can think of: misrepresentation, boycott and flamewars. Misrepresentation It happened in the past that someone used their Debian address in activities which were not connected with Debian, and which should definitely not have been connected with Debian. When watchful debianers found out, we had a ritual flamewar in some mailing list, and the offender was asked to stop or leave. End of the problem. In this case, people watching and noticing and reporting bad things have been very useful to the project. Boycott I can't think of a precedent of boycott, so I'll make one up. Let's say for example that James Troup, a key person in Debian who is employed full-time by Canonical, has the idea of making Ubuntu better by making Debian worse, and starts boicotting Debian by blocking packages in the NEW queue. Who's gaining from it? Surely not Canonical, who resyncs with Debian's improvements every 6 months, and is strongly interested in finding more good software to cherry-pick from. Thing is, none of us who has a direct interest in Debian could want to boycott it. That would impact Debian's interests, yes, but also those of the boycotters. Debian is one of those virtuous circles in which even conflicting entities have an interest in cooperating[2]. Flamewars Every other month, a huge boring flamewar starts with some conspiration theory blaming James Troup of not processing the NEW queue because of connections with NSA, Al Quaeda and the little green men featured in The Greatest American Hero. This is a sign of people watching. Which is good, because it's how we catch events such as the guy misrepresenting Debian. It becomes a problem when the discussion is uncivilised or uninformed. If it's uncivilised, then what we have is a burnt-out Debian Developer who needs more hugs, and a thread to delete. If it's uninformed, then what we have is a problem in transparency: watchers can't watch well enough. The watchers should learn to investigate better, and the watched should learn to be more open. Ciao, Enrico [1] Those who fund Ubuntu [2] We're not the only one: Cinepaint (http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/) has a nice and catchy history as well: http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/docs/history.html There's many of these magic situations happening everywhere, luckily. -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>
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