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

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> 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]?

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.

>               What happened? A trustee went forward and did that change
> on behalf of trustees ("copyright is trustee territory") against my will
> [1]. A few hours later, as I had 'predicted', Intel finally publicly
> announced that the license change will be reverted and I was able to
> revert that commit [2]. The message I got from reading mgorny's
> *Trustee* manifesto is, that he doesn't like such an interference (which
> will bring us to your second question).

I agree that immediately assigning bug 664134 [4] to Trustees seems a
little strange. Normally, such simple mistakes should be worked out with
the maintainer, and only escalated to Trustees if (e.g.) a decision of
general principle is needed.

Ulrich

> [1] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=933df6
> [2] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=db0abe

[3] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=027f0fe01f13d654cb1aebf8b9f45006002851a8
[4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/664134