Steve McIntyre <st...@einval.com> writes: > Bastien wrote: >> It seems that the tech committee is composed of two well known ubuntu >> developers. Isn't that biased? I mean do you see them voting against >> upstart, I know that the decision should be based around technical >> facts, but that is not in their interest to vote against their project, >> especially since canonical is isolating itself from the rest of the >> community, so having Debian support is, I guess, really important, so
> -1, Troll. > Please apologise to the TC members immediately for your insinuations > of corruption, or go away and don't come back. Hang on a second. I really don't think Bastien is accusing people of corruption. Rather, he's saying that people have a conflict of interest. And he's right; there is a conflict of interest. I think it's fair game to say that, and I think it's important to say that. Governance processes should be open and forthright about conflicts of interest. Just because someone is conflicted doesn't mean that there's necessarily a problem, or even that they necessarily need to recuse themselves. It all depends on the nature of the conflict and the nature of the issues involved, what role they have in the decision-making process, and so forth. But those conflicts absolutely should be acknowledged, since that's the first step in analyzing what action should be taken about them, if any. Free software communities tend to be small and very tightly entwined, so conflicts of interest are (in my experience) common in free software governance and sometimes unavoidable. That makes it all the more important to talk about them, be conscious of them, and decide how one is going to handle them. You'll often see people talk about taking off or putting on different hats; that is, in part, a ritual and mental reminder that one has potential conflicts of interest and one should be very clear in one's own mind about what role one is playing at any given point. For example, I also have multiple potential conflicts of interest in my TC work: I'm also a Policy editor, which can be relevant when the TC issue is an escalated Policy dispute, and I work for an employer who uses Debian heavily and therefore have an incentive to support things in Debian that my employer would want to see happen. Those are conflicts that I have to be aware of and manage. There's absolutely nothing wrong with publicly discussing conflicts of interest and being aware of them, and reminding people that they do have conflicts. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87d2mt9vs8....@windlord.stanford.edu