Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Council Reminder for August 7

[Ferris McCormick]

On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 12:48 +0200, Lukasz Damentko wrote:
> 2008/8/1 Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o>:
> > On 23:17 Thu 31 Jul     , Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> >> If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote
> >> on, let us know! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev
> >> list to see.
> >
> > I know at least one person has already submitted an agenda item. Please
> > do so again here along with a brief summary, so we can get them all in
> > one place.
> >
> > I waste a lot of time digging through lists looking for requested agenda
> > items, and I could be spending it making Gentoo better instead.
> >
> > --
> > Thanks,
> > Donnie
> >
> > Donnie Berkholz
> > Developer, Gentoo Linux
> > Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com
> >
>
> Fair enough. Let me wrap up the IRC part.
>
> 1. I'd like to ask Council to discuss possible reactions to our
> developer being banned from Freenode without providing us with a
> reason. The situation looks like one of Freenode staffers overreacted
> over something Chris said during previous Council meeting and banned
> him to prevent him from attending next meetings when he was supposed
> to provide more information on the CoC topic. The ban was removed
> after an hour, but they still refuse to provide us with reasons for it
> which looks like (mostly because we weren't shown any sane
> justification for the ban) a cover up operation. It would be good if
> Council officially protested against that ban and demanded a detailed
> explanation from Freenode staff.
>

After some discussions, I think that legally Freenode are pretty
severely limited in what they may and may not provide to us concerning
any of their users.  To them, Chris is a Freenode user and their own
privacy policy prohibits them from disclosing anything private
concerning him.  They are also subject to various international privacy
rules, but I do not know the extent of these.

So, as I understand it, Council can ask for anything it likes, but
Freenode's lawyer is not going to allow Freenode to provide much
information without written consent and proof of identity from Chris,
and I believe this is not negotiable.  For Freenode routinely to feed
reasons for any actions involving Gentoo developers back to Gentoo
management, their lawyer has told them they would need a retroactive
written consent form from *every* developer along with proof of
identity.  As I read the lawyer's statement, this is an absolute.

Any provider of IRC services (including us if we ever provide them to
the public) is going to be under similar restrictions, I believe.

I have mentioned this briefly to the trustees because the Foundation is
concerned with the legal rules controlling Gentoo, its services, and its
service providers.  I am hoping for more details from Freenode staff,
but cannot guarantee them.

Required ethical disclaimer:  I provide this only for information.  It
is not a legal opinion, nor am I qualified to give a legal opinion on
international privacy laws.  I will go so far as to say that the
Freenode privacy statement looks as if it was drafted by a lawyer to
ensure Freenode's users that (to quote):
"PDPC will not publish that information or provide it to any other third
party without your explicit permission, except as required by law or as
appropriate in the course of an investigation of criminal wrongdoing.
PDPC will make a good faith effort to maintain the privacy of your
personal information."
Thus they are exposed to a law suit if they provide the information I
think you are asking for.
 (Privacy policy at: http://freenode.net/group_privacy.shtml )
> 2. I want Council to consider moving their meetings somewhere where
> third parties can't control who in Gentoo can attend and who can't.
> Like our own small and created just for this purpose IRC server. A
> situation when a third party may disallow our developer from attending
> a meeting without even telling us why isn't the healthiest one. We
> should be independent from such decisions of third parties so they
> can't politically influence Council decisions by removing people who
> are inconvenient for them. Now when it (most probably) happened once,
> we have no other choice but to believe it's possible it will happen
> again.
>
> 3. I want Council to consider creating and using irc.gentoo.org alias
> instead of irc.freenode.net in our docs, news items and so on. The
> alias would allow us to move out of the network more easily should we
> ever decide to do so. Debian did exactly the same a couple of months
> ago prior to them moving out to OFTC
> (http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060604)  so maybe it would be a
> good idea to have this for Gentoo too. Infra (Shyam Mani) say it isn't
> a problem at all to create and maintain it, we in fact already have
> something like this pointing at Freenode, it would be just a question
> of updating that alias and updating our docs with it. It would
> increase our independence from Freenode and make future network
> switching much easier should we ever decide it's time to part our ways
> with our current IRC service provider.
>
> The intention behind all three items is to increase our independence
> from our IRC service provider.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Lukasz Damentko

Regards,
Ferris
-- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@g.o>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc, Userrel, Trustees)