Re: are we being honest about legal resources?

From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen(at)complete(dot)org>
To: spi-general(at)lists(dot)spi-inc(dot)org
Cc: MJ Ray <mjr(at)phonecoop(dot)coop>
Subject: Re: are we being honest about legal resources?
Date: 2008-03-12 16:12:31
Message-ID: 200803121112.32230.jgoerzen@complete.org
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On Wed March 12 2008 10:38:46 am MJ Ray wrote:
> The detail of the www team's extent or powers seems a bit too hazy to
> rely on those. Is it just the listed members (debwww group IIRC), the
> core WWW Team (webwml) or the listed address debian-www(at)lists(dot)d(dot)o?

Please, MJ. This has NO PLACE on an SPI list. I'm a Debian developer and
*I* don't even care. Take it to Debian.

> Priority project? One of www's maintainers marked it as an RC bug and
> none of the others downgraded it in about 4 years. If someone has
> decided that this matter can't get advice from SPI's lawyer, or that
> debian has been advised, the bug tracker should be told, either way.

Ditto for that.

Nobody at SPI should have to care about finding and updating bugs in some
member project's BTS. That simply doesn't scale.

> What is unreasonable is making up new rules to claim a simple question
> was forbidden or invalid because only one of SPI members asked.
> That's just dicking people around with bureaucracy IMO.

What new rule? It's been long established how SPI deals with member
projects. Each member project has a defined way of interacting with SPI.
And you are not it.

> As pointed out previously, a past DPL was involved and one of the SPI
> board is asking the current DPL for the current view. Please let's
> wait for that and see how the DPL election plays out (two candidates
> have different types of web work as part of their platforms so far,
> which seems a good reason to vote for them) and keep further flames
> off this list.

Again, irrelevant. SPI should not have to become involved with internal
politics of its member projects. The current DPL is the current DPL and can
interact with SPI if he so chooses, according to his judgement. If you want
to keep flames from this list, please stop pouring gasoline on the fire, ok?

It simply is not scalable for SPI to expend resources any time a specific
vocal mailing list poster wants SPI to. Don't forget that lawyers are not
the only resources involved; board members time is involved too. As a
general policy, I would find it exceptionally odd if SPI were to expend
resources on behalf of a member project when that member project hadn't
requested it.

Now, in this particular case, I haven't researched the history of it. The
only justification I could see here is if SPI believes something illegal is
going on that could expose SPI (and, by extension, its member projects) to
serious legal liability. In this case, the SPI board ought to take action
on their own to investigate the situation. However, I haven't seen anything
to indicate that this is the situation here.

-- John

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