Re: [gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-nfp] 2021 Trustees election

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 10:16 AM Aaron Bauman <bman@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 07, 2021 at 07:32:12AM +0300, Joonas Niilola wrote:
> >
> > Out of curiosity, with an umbrella organization could there be any fear
> > for a similar takeover that happened with Freenode?
> >
>
> There is a possibility of such, but it is highly unlikely.
>
> More realistic/probable concerns are umbrellas enforcing
> rules/guidelines/requirements that Gentoo may not agree with.

IMO these are effectively the same thing.  When the situation with
Freenode was nothing more than a legal formality nobody cared about
it.  As soon as it starts to have practical impact on how things work
(or is anticipated to), that is when everybody starts getting upset.

I do think some of your examples are the sorts of things that are very
likely to come up based on current trends, and you can use your
imagination to consider others.  Whether these are a concern or not is
going to vary based on individual sentiments.

Either way (umbrella takeover or internal takeover), the "Libera
solution" would still be an option.  This is why I think that the best
defense against hostile takeover is minimizing dependence on lots of
complex infrastructure for core functions.  The less you have to
replace the less painful it is to do.  If ICE or whatever seized
gentoo.org, and our emails all start bouncing and DNS addresses of
servers/etc stop resolving, do enough people know how to find each
other to put the band back together (I'm guessing we wouldn't lose
access to IRC in that case, so probably yes)?

This isn't intended to start a tangent, just to point out that this
legal risk is hard to avoid when your operational and legal orgs are
somewhat disjoint.

-- 
Rich