On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 03:33:18PM +0100, Alexander Wirt wrote: > Ok I had a longer talk to Michael Meskes and I am now able to > understand you (and his) position a little bit better. > > I (personally) would be willing to accept the lists under the > following conditions:
Thanks. Before answering your request let me try to address some of the
concerns which seem to be still pending in this thread.
There exist companies with an interest in Debian. Those companies are
not part of the Debian Project and, when they need to interact with the
Project they do so by the usual means, e.g. mailing -project/-devel or
other lists for public discussions, or mailing leader@d.o if they look
for an official representative of the project. They have a common
interest (deploying Debian-based solutions for their customers) and they
often face the same problems (e.g. how can we get $foo to "certify"
their software for Debian, so that we can deploy Debian to more
customers?). The best description of what they are, stolen from Michael
Meskes, is probably a "debian business user group".
I think that Debian, as a Project, doesn't want to --- or maybe isn't
capable of --- fix the problems of such a group. After all, many of us
are in a volunteer distro also because we don't want to care about
market-driven concerns. I'd like to empower people of this group to fix
these problems by themselves. All it takes to start is that we welcome
people to work on these problems *on their own* and a bit of hosting for
them. If they think they need a private list hosting, so be it.
I don't consider the activities they will be doing as activities of the
Debian Project. I also expect people on the list to interact with the
Project as they have been doing up to now: either on public lists or
contacting the DPL at leader@d.o (FWIW, the DPL routinely redirect
non-private requests addressed to leader@d.o to the most appropriate
public list). So I don't see a problem of full disclosure here, and I
think we should first work on fixing the issue of openness we still have
in Debian before imposing our so called "standards" to others.
... unless people want to maintain that Debian should not even *host* a
private list for 3rd party activities. I notice that we have done so in
the past --- I see for example a non archived "sart" list on lists.d.o,
and we have also hosted lists for SPI that nowadays has a private
members list --- and I don't see why we should not do that in presence
of a reasonable request.
Regarding Don's points about potential internal conflicts of interest in
the group, they are reasonable concerns. But to be honest I don't think
*we*, as Debian, should be worried about that. Having been asked for
some list hosting, I think we should be happy to give it, how the
participants will decide to use it and fix the corresponding governance
problems is up to them.
Now, to Alexander requests:
> Before the list is created I want an exact policy who is allowed to
> get subscribed to this list.
I've provided a tentative answer for this in my first mail, but I'm not
sure it's compatible with the way listmasters work. To bootstrap the
system, would be good enough to say "the DPL moderates subscription
requests and say yes/no to them"?
I'm not particularly thrilled at the idea of doing that on the long run
and I expect the participants to define at some point a governance
structure with criteria of who can get in. But there is a chicken and
egg problem on how to get started and I volunteer to fix that.
> A better description of the list should be done that leads into a
> press announcement that invites everybody (that matches the
> subscription policy) to participate in the discussion on the list.
That was already planned, yes. Also because I see no other ways to
attract potentially interested companies to it... If you see that as a
requirement for list creation, I can also draft a press release and post
it to this bug log.
> (Optional, but nice): Some representatives of the debian project
> should participate on the list.
For this, leader@d.o seems to make sense too. For everything else, I
think we should recommend that people use the usual communication
channels instead of relying about specific Debian people being
subscribed to the list.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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