Re: [gentoo-project] Questions for Gentoo Council nominees: Council demands on maintainers & council legal liability

[Thomas Deutschmann]

On 2019-07-04 18:37, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 04 Jul 2019, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
>> For the records: When I read mgorny's statement I got a different
>> message in first place. Do you remind the sys-firmware/intel-microcode
>> license hick hack around ~2018-08-23? As maintainer and as a person with
>> some insights I *knew* that Intel was going to revert that license
>> change. Therefore I didn't want to rev bump package for just a few hours
>> or days to avoid causing unnecessary work for all of us, including
>> Gentoo users.
>
> Sorry, I don't understand. If you knew in advance (how?) that Intel was
> going to revert, why had you added an ebuild for that 20180807 snapshot
> version with the restrictive terms, in the first place [3]?

What do you mean? "intel-microcode-20180807_p20180808.ebuild" didn't add
new restriction or changed anything. Yes, I missed that license change
when 20180807 release was added. If I would have noticed that license
change at time, I wouldn't have bumped the package.


> Also with the information available at that point, we had to assume that
> redistribution of that particular microcode-20180807.tgz tarball was not
> allowed, so the ebuild should have had mirror restriction.

No, my point was, at the time when people within in Gentoo learned about
the changed license through the Debian bug (weeks after the bump), they
suddenly switched into panic mode. There wasn't even time to wait for
Debian and other, no, people not knowing *any* details and weren't aware
of any communication between maintainers across distributions just
thought that they must do something and they must do it immediately.

Please see the IRC discussion we had in #gentoo-dev around 2018-08-23. I
told everyone involved before a trustee changed ebuild that Intel will
revert. The information was leaked through Intel PR team starting to
give interviews because the changed license received media attention
that day. May I remind everyone about the ridiculous discussion we had
about whether Intel(!) PR(!) is credible or if we can't trust because
they aren't lawyers and maybe they aren't allowed to make such a
statement? An hour later I was able to confirm that information through
Intel OEM partner channel. All I was asking for was time. But Matthew
ignored everything I said, rushed forward and pushed that change with
trustee hat.

Like said, if you can be held legally accountable and don't understand
what's going on I can understand if at some point you just decide to
take action to cover your ass because if you get in trouble because of
that you will be on your own and nobody will help you. Anyway, this is
now history.


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
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