Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo's Social Contract & Bugzilla

[Peter Gordon]

Luis Francisco Araujo wrote:
> I think it is perfectly valid we use this kind of tools for development;
> as far as i know, our SC refers to those components (in form of software
> and metadata) to be free software upon which a user depend to build a
> Gentoo system, and this isn't one of those components. Though i admit it
> might bring some kind of 'controversy' .

I've got no problem with people wanting to actively use proprietary
software instead of F/OSS alternatives because of much better features,
security record, etc. (Here's where that phpBB vs vBulletin example
comes to mind again.) Heck, it's their choice, right? My quarrel is with
the fact that this would be the designated tool for full development
usage and whatnot.

However, I don't believe that Bugzilla is such a separate entity from
the distribution as a whole. I, for one, would simply stop reporting
bugs there if it was switched to a proprietary bug-tracking tool. Now,
one could say that this isn't much of a problem (since it's all entirely
voluntary, right?); but think of this on a grander scale of other F/OSS
advocates: you would have much less community involvement.

One of the core foundations, as I see it, of a community-driven Linux
distribution such as Gentoo is exactly that: the community. Bugzilla
provides a reasonably-somewhat-sane infrastructure to keep track of the
various bugs, issues, and feature requests being put forth by its users
and is one of the primary methods of communication between the user and
developer camps.

Regards.
-- 
Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
Gentoo Forums Global Moderator
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