Re: Question to all candidates: How do you feel about OSI, FSF and LF? (and Debian while we're at it (and AI if you want to))
Hello,
>How do you feel about organisations such as the Open Source Initiative,
>Free Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation?
I think we should work closely with them, as well.
>We have two candidates who have mentioned their intent to collaborate
>more closely with Ubuntu, but should we also be doing more to
>collaborate with these?
If we need, yes. For Ubuntu we need some of their patches, so upstreaming Ubuntu patches
is something useful for the project. Nothing comes in mind w.r.t. such organizations,
but if collaboration is needed, I strongly support it.
>In cases where our goals start to diverge from these organisations (or
>more accurately, when their goals start to diverge from ours, but bah! I
>don't want to lead the question too much), should we be paying
>attention? Or even take action?
We should *always* pay attention to their needs, and make sure they
can converge with our needs. To not point any finger, as said before,
I don't really like the tivoization issue, and the whole GPL-3 ecosistem.
I think Debian should also help companies to build their software, and let
them close if needed. We lost a lot of business opportunities of this GPL-3
licensing stuff, and to me this is a failure as a project.
That said, we provide an Open Source OS, we cannot deal with all
the possible use cases for companies adopting our OS, but I guess
some more close look to the market needs will also be beneficial for
us, in terms of revenues, market share, adoption, and funding.
>And pointing the finger to ourselves, how well do you think the Debian
>Social contract and DFSG holds up? As a DPL candidate, do you think
>there's anything substantially missing?
>
>https://www.debian.org/social_contract
No,not right now, we already have a change 3 years ago.
>Do you think that there are there ways we could do better at those
>promises and be a better Debian?
yes, assume good faith. I think some people, sometimes are failing at that.
>And another bonus question. How do you feel about the general concept of
>free software going forward? Is it something that is growing / embraced
>by the world (big corporations, software companies, etc), or is the
>trend to nerf it and trend towards models such as open-core and exploit
>it as far as possible?
it is growing, but we can do better. In my opinion we might want to start thinking about
providing some cloud infrastructure, or even some AI based on our code.
Bonus point, let AI analyze the code to find potential bugs and report upstream/developers if anything is found
>And another because I'm supposed to be driving to work and it's more fun
>to type questions than to sit in traffic... how do you feel about how AI
>is going? Massive corporations are scraping and processing vast amounts
>of work in the commons that gets regurgitated as new and original code.
>Where do you stand on this, both ethically and in the context of the
>future of projects like Debian?
We shouldn't loose the AI embracing opportunity. We can have some sort of open source
AI, and we should pursue it, otherwise the risk will be of Debian being kicked out from the market
even more.
Also salsa might want to add some AI checks for patches sanity, or upload sanity to help developers
not do usual mistakes (I'm staring at myself for adding patches and forgetting to update series file)
G.
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