Re: Proposal: Recall the Project Leader
Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org> writes:
>> And if you're really claiming that no one who holds any delegated
>> position in Debian should be allowed to be involved in any organization
>> that funds Debian developers... I quite frankly find that to be an
>> insane position to hold. I can only imagine it decreasing the number
>> of people willing to serve Debian in a delegate capacity.
> Oh my.
I agree with the sentiment of the text quoted above; I think that position
would be very unrealistic.
Many of us use Debian as part of our jobs; that's the reason why we got
involved in Debian in the first place. Stanford pays me in part to be a
Debian developer because Stanford cares about having a high quality Debian
distribution to deploy on its infrastructure servers and specifically
about having high-quality Kerberos and AFS packages. I bet there are
dozens, probably hundreds, of other system administrators here who are in
a similar position, where their job is not entirely Debian by any stretch
but where they have official blessing to do some work on Debian on their
employer's time and hence are being funded to be Debian developers.
Delegates aren't somehow magically different, and there aren't enough
people willing to do critical central work that one can rule out everyone
who has such an agreement with their employer. In fact, having such an
agreement with one's employer is even *more* important for a delegated
position that involves a larger time committment. Otherwise, the only
people you could get to take on time-intensive delegated positions are
people who either have very flexible working conditions or who have
sufficient personal funds to not have to work a full-time job.
It is absolutely worthwhile to expect people in such positions to act in
the best interests of Debian, to be aware of their different hats, and to
be cautious about having a variety of people coming from a variety of
different positions involved in critical decisions. This isn't exactly a
new problem, though, and *many* free software projects have already dealt
with issues like this in a reasonable way.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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