Re: [gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-nfp] 2021 Trustees election

[Aaron Bauman]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2021 at 10:58:31AM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 10:16 AM Aaron Bauman <bman@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 07, 2021 at 07:32:12AM +0300, Joonas Niilola wrote:
> > >
> > > Out of curiosity, with an umbrella organization could there be any fear
> > > for a similar takeover that happened with Freenode?
> > >
> >
> > There is a possibility of such, but it is highly unlikely.
> >
> > More realistic/probable concerns are umbrellas enforcing
> > rules/guidelines/requirements that Gentoo may not agree with.
>
> IMO these are effectively the same thing.  When the situation with
> Freenode was nothing more than a legal formality nobody cared about
> it.  As soon as it starts to have practical impact on how things work
> (or is anticipated to), that is when everybody starts getting upset.
>
> I do think some of your examples are the sorts of things that are very
> likely to come up based on current trends, and you can use your
> imagination to consider others.  Whether these are a concern or not is
> going to vary based on individual sentiments.
>
> Either way (umbrella takeover or internal takeover), the "Libera
> solution" would still be an option.  This is why I think that the best
> defense against hostile takeover is minimizing dependence on lots of
> complex infrastructure for core functions.  The less you have to
> replace the less painful it is to do.  If ICE or whatever seized
> gentoo.org, and our emails all start bouncing and DNS addresses of
> servers/etc stop resolving, do enough people know how to find each
> other to put the band back together (I'm guessing we wouldn't lose
> access to IRC in that case, so probably yes)?
>

Good point. I agree this is a viable and smart option to pursue.

> This isn't intended to start a tangent, just to point out that this
> legal risk is hard to avoid when your operational and legal orgs are
> somewhat disjoint.
>

They are disjoint by design and would remain disjoint (internal or
umbrella), hence your decentralization point.

-Aaron