Re: Draft resolution formalising Debian's Associated Project status

On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 11:28:41AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > If however the SPI is responsible for making a judgement call about
> > the murky nature of Debian politics, particularly since certain
> > aspects of Debian's policies and procedures are not necessarily
> > clearly defined (or at least subject to dispute leading to mailing
> > list flames that go on and on for hundreds of messages) from a legal
> > point of view, then SPI could get dragged into what could be a nasty,
> > and potentially arbitrarily expensive legal adjucation procedure.
>
> I'm not so worried about legal culpability (how would Debian sue SPI
> when SPI provides Debian's legal help?). However, I *am* worried
> about making the wrong decision, and pissing off the "winners" in a
> long-running Debian dispute, and thus causing Debian members to
> distrust SPI and call for pulling out. This is *directly* based on
> my experience with the Dunc-Tank proposal.

Hopefully it would never come to one side gathering up enough money to
sue the other side *and* SPI due to some internal Debian dispite; but
then again the whole brou-ha-ha over whether or not some Debian
Developers are allowed to be paind money (either by Debian or by a
group of DD's who are exercise their right of free association to
funnel money towards other DD's) have already caused people to do
things that I wouldn't have thought likely for reasonable people to
do, so it's something that I'd worry about, at least.

> I really don't think that MJ and Ian realize how opaque and chaotic
> Debian politics are to outsiders.

Outsiders, heck! What about to insiders? :-)

- Ted