On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 8:23 AM, David Bruant <[email protected]> wrote:
> Le 07/08/2013 12:03, Tom Farrow a écrit : > > I find that the idea would be beneficial to the community since >> currently, a lot of activity is done based on trust and while having trust >> in Mozilla is important, there should be some way to reinforce that trust >> legally. >> > I'd like to clarify on this point. In no way does signing a (legal) > document ever "reinforces" trust. It may even make people feel suspicious: > "why do I have to sign a legal document if we trust one another?" > They also serve to remind somebody to do the right thing. At my university, we all signed the honor code at the top of every exam. It wasn't a legal document but a reminder. (There's quite a bit about this in the book The Honest Truth about Dishonesty by Dan Areily.) Stormy > > Legal documents exist to make easier the time when you go to court *after* > things went wrong. That's pretty much the only thing they're useful for and > is largely unrelated to trust. It has become a de facto standard in the > corporate world where the default attitude is to not trust the other party > (sometimes for very good reasons, but that's not the topic at hand). > > At my previous job, we had signed contracts saying our employer had to pay > us wages every month. At some point, he stopped paying (company ran out of > money, he hadn't told us). What was our legal document good for then? Well, > we got our salaries eventually several months later, but meanwhile the > trust had been betrayed and the financial situation of some of us wasn't > easy for quite some time. > > Trust is important. Legal documents only when things go wrong (and > admittedly are an incentive to avoid having things go wrong) and one can > wonder whether they are really of any use. Specifically for IT and the > immense level of responsibility and authority people are provided. If > someone poisons 500M Firefox install by sending a malicious update, you can > sue the person afterwards, ask billions, send that person to jail for a > century, it won't make up for Firefox reputation. > > > Gervase Markham wrote: > >> The Committer's Agreement is a reminder of and a pledge of good >> behaviour on the part of someone gaining commit access. Is that how you >> would characterise the IT agreement? >> > That sounds more useful than a legal document in Mozilla's context. > > David > > ______________________________**_________________ > governance mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance> > _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
