[gentoo-dev] Well, that was, um, interesting

[Grant Goodyear]

I've been away for a few days, so somehow I missed the great
drobbins/ciaranm debate, where many, many current and former devs
behaved badly.  (At the same time, I thought that genone and antarus
behaved quite well.  I'm sure others did, too, but those two stood
out to me.)

Drobbins, many things have changed since you left--some even for the
better, although that may be hard to believe right now.  Civility,
however, has not been one of those.  I'll try to answer some of the
questions you've asked.  No, there is no current requirement for
copyright transfer, but the primary goals of the Gentoo Foundation are
still to protect Gentoo's intellectual property and to provide an
infrastructure that can handle funds.  As gregkh pointed out, it has
become increasingly clear that copyright transfer is not the only
solution to proecting IP; the model that the Linux kernel has been using
seems to work quite well.  So, finding the appropriate solution for us
has been elusive, and we're still working on it (with the help of legal
counsel).  We've also worked hard to open up the culture a bit, so that
people who are not devs can still meaningfully contribute beyond just
filing bugs.  That has little to do with ciaranm working on PMS, though.
In that case he's working on the spec because spb volunteered to work on
it, and spb realized that by creating an alternative to portage, ciaranm
had more knowledge of the current behavior of portage than anybody else,
except, possibly, for the current portage devs (who I don't believe
wanted the job) and the pkgcore folks (who are developing another
alternative to portage).  That's an asset that spb felt was worthwhile.
Of course, one may reasonably argue that ciaranm's ability to send
people right over the edge makes him more of a liability than an asset.
I'm probably forgotten to answer several of your questions, but you are
always welcome to ask me, and I will do my best to answer.  Welcome
back, by the way.  (You may think you've left, but my recollection is
that we have a cooling-off period before you're really retired.)

I haven't had a chance to view the video that vapier mentioned.  Anybody
want to provide a synopsis?  I'd much appreciate it.

Personally, I'm with seemant.  I'd much prefer it if people would just
be civil even when others are not.  (Hey, if everybody's allowed one
seriously bad day per year, we have enough devs that on any given day
_someone's_ going to be having his or her allotted bad day!)  

That said, I'm not necessarily opposed to mandating civility, a la
Ubuntu.  I do see a minor problem with that approach, though: right now
it is not clear that Gentoo has a group of devs who are sufficiently
trusted and willing to actually punish incivility.  Thoughts?

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76