Re: [gentoo-project] Questions for Gentoo Council nominees: Council demands on maintainers & council legal liability

[Thomas Deutschmann <whissi@gentoo.org>]

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On 2019-07-04 04:14, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> I realize that there is only a short period left in the election, but
> I've been busy with IRL issues, and mgorny's trustee manifesto [1] ascribed
> something to the Council members that concerned me; there's one
> additional good question for the Council that I'll close with.
> 
> 1. Points 1a&1c of mgorny's manifesto imply that the council can
>    unilaterally prevent support of any given package in Gentoo, and
>    basically remove the package from the distribution.
> 
>    This is despite any developers that may wish to support the package.
> 
>    What's your opinion of the council using this offensively against
>    packages? As a hypothetical, say systemd-ng comes about, with an even
>    worse opinionated choices than those presently in systemd. Should the
>    council be able to force support for openrc & systemd stop?

My understanding of the council is, that the council itself is 'passive'
and isn't responsible for developing/pushing new visions/ideas just
because it is the council. That means that the council, representing the
community, will *only* vote on behalf of the community on motions the
community brought up. Of course because any council member is also part
of the community, council members can start a motion like any other
community member. But it will happen without any council hat and
everything must follow the same rules/process (mailing lists...).

Regarding the specific example:
At the moment, and I don't see this changing, any developer is free to
do whatever they want to do in Gentoo as long as they don't break things
and follow Gentoo rules. So if there will be a new init system and
someone wants to support that, he/she is free to do that (as long as
he/she is able to do that across whole repository without violating
Gentoo rules (like QA...). tl;dr "As long as maintainer isn't doing
something crazy").

Only if someone else within community will create a motion that the
proposition should be stopped for $reasons this will become topic for
council. And after following the process, council member will finally
have decide on that motion.

Regarding 1c: It's the money of the foundation. At the moment, council
has no rights to tell foundation how they have to spend the money. As
long as foundation won't change that (for example they could at least
give council one vote for funding requests), we don't really need to
talk about this.


For the records: When I read mgorny's statement I got a different
message in first place. Do you remind the sys-firmware/intel-microcode
license hick hack around ~2018-08-23? As maintainer and as a person with
some insights I *knew* that Intel was going to revert that license
change. Therefore I didn't want to rev bump package for just a few hours
or days to avoid causing unnecessary work for all of us, including
Gentoo users. What happened? A trustee went forward and did that change
on behalf of trustees ("copyright is trustee territory") against my will
[1]. A few hours later, as I had 'predicted', Intel finally publicly
announced that the license change will be reverted and I was able to
revert that commit [2]. The message I got from reading mgorny's
*Trustee* manifesto is, that he doesn't like such an interference (which
will bring us to your second question).


> 2. As an additional point, can you try to give your version of a simple
>    statement on the legal liabilities that the Council as a whole, and
>    the Council members as individuals, have for their actions?

At the moment, council has zero legal liabilities. That's because
council has no legal body. In Gentoo, only the Gentoo foundation has a
legal body. But to my knowledge, foundation doesn't even mention council
in any legal document, i.e. council doesn't exist from foundation's POV
(council is only tolerated) so council currently doesn't have any
official position with legal liabilities.

With this in mind, sure, as trustee with legal obligations for the
foundation no one else has, I understand that you sometimes believe you
must cover your 'ass' because foundation will hold you responsible for
any damage you may cause (this will include damages you don't cause in
first place but could have prevented).
Regarding my example with intel-microcode package: If you as trustee
really believe that Gentoo foundation could be in *real trouble* due to
that license violation... you have to do your thing because if you are
right and didn't do your job, you can be sure that foundation will try
to get their money back from you... assuming board won't get approval of
the actions).


See also:
=========
[1] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=933df6

[2] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=db0abe


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5


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