]] Didier 'OdyX' Raboud > Assuming a hypothetical Debian contributor with financial interests in > a hotel business, part-time software engineer and affiliated to a > political party: not all three connections matter in all Debian work, > or discussions. The first might matter though iff people start > considering paying for accomodation in hir hotel; the second might > matter in a discussion about a piece of software they are paid to work > on, and the latter might matter when discussing the Debian project's > eventual reaction to a complicate situation somewhere in the > world. But these only matter in specific discussions, not constantly.
Indeed. I also think there's a hang-up about financial conflicts of interest in the discussion, but for at least me (and I suspect others), money is a pretty weak motivator. I generally have enough that it's something I don't need to spend much mental energy on. An example of what I do think could cause conflicts of interest is where I'm part of some community (free software or not) and my interest is in ensuring I have a good standing or status in that community and this colours judgements I make in Debian. I object to collecting all that information, though. It would feel entirely too intrusive. There's a question of what is a legitimate interest and what is not, and this might be worth exploring, but I suspect it all comes down to «it depends» and reasonableness tests. > Where I'm going to is that I feel we're much better in a situation > where we don't load all our conversations with references to _all_ our > "real-life" interests. It opens the floodgates to interpret any > position under the light of these interests, neglecting the mere idea > that for plenty (if not all) of Debian interactions, we are genuinely > acting as independent individuals. I think «geniunely acting as independent individuals» is a meaningless concept, since everything we do is coloured by the context we're in and that includes social relations. > That said, I still think that there are situations in which declaring > one's conflicts of interest _does_ matter, but I do expect the > affected individual to either explcitly retract (or stay away) from > the discussion, or declare the conflict of interest at that point. I agree with this, if you do see a possible and reasonable conflict of interest, declare it and discuss it. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
