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:

> On 2019-07-04 18:37, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> 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.

Exactly, and nobody will blame you for that mistake, because the license
change was unannounced and easy to miss.

>> 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.

Thanks, with this additional context about the IRC discussion, things
become clearer. I was going by the information visible in bug 664134,
where there is no indication of any disagreement.

Ulrich