I'm a bit dubious about a ChatGPT authored Conflict of Interest (COI) policy because most of them that you will find on-line, and thus what a Large Language Model (LLM) will regurgitate, are meant for orgaizations where you have a small body of people who vote.
So for example, if you serve on the board of a church, or a non-profit orgaization like Usenix, or the Rocky Enterrise Software Foundation (RESF), if there is a motion where you might benefit depending on how the decision comes out, the CoI policy will mandate that you abstain from voting on the motion. This is where the "refrain from participating from a decision" language might come from. Howeer, it is quite common that someone with that potental conflict of interest is often a subject matter expert. For example, if you are a primary owner of a general contracting company, then you will know a lot about building construction; so if the vote is about which company should be hired, the board would *want* to hear your insights. So typically the conflict of interest would be disclosed, the expert would give their opinions, insights, and other expertise to the board --- and then the expert might abstain from voting on the actual motion if they were a board member. The problem is that in Debian, we rarely vote when we make decisions. This does happen, of course, such as when the Technical Committee votes on something that might be a very close call. In that case, it would make sense for a TC member who might have conflict of interest to step aside. However, many decisions take place via discussion / debates on public mailing list --- so what does refrain from participating in a decision mean in that context? That the people who might have the most expertise must not participate in the debate? That seems.... counterproductive. So there, probably the best you could do is to make sure people should be asked to disclose conflicts of interest up front, although in many cases, it might be obvious (for example if the e-mail address has canonical.com....). Another such situation is if a maintainer makes a decision as it relates to a package where they are the primary maintainer. This case can get quite ticklish, because very often, they *are* one of the primary experts about the package; that's why they are the maintain the package. And that might also be why a company decided to hire them. For example, I got hired by Google because I was the ext4 kernel maintainer, and I did make changes that made it easier for e2fsprogs to be built on ProdNG, which was a Debian variant for use internally at Google[1]. [1] "Live Upgrading Thousands of Servers from an Ancient Red Hat Distribution to 10 Year Newer Debian Based One" https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/lisa13/lisa13-merlin.pdf The changes that I made din't compromise Debian at all (I doubt anyone noticed, since they din't cause any changes in the binary packages generated by e2fsprogs' debian/rujles file for Debian. But this was a decision that was made that benefited Google, *and* Debian because it meant that we got a lot more testing on thousands and thousands of servers runnig in data centesr al over the world. Is that a "conflict of interest"? Lots of similar scenarios happened where Debian Maintainers were hired by Canonical, and did work while being paid by Canonical in a way that substantially benefited Debian *and* Ubuntu. Should people in these sorts of situations be "not allowed to participate in decisions" as the package maintainer because of some silly ChatGPT authored policy? I think not. Ultimately, this is a case where I think we do have recourse already, which is if a package maintainer makes a decision which is detrimenta to Debian, that decision can always be appealed to they TC. So I could imagine COI policies for specific, small bodies in Debian where decisions get made via voting, such as the TC. However, I don't believe it makes sense for large bodies; for example, excluiding people from voting on a GR just because they might have a conflict of interest means that we could potentially depriving people of their franchise, which I think would be a Bad Thing. So if someone adopted this as a constitutional amendment, I would vote against it. The final thing I would note is that our structure means that in some cases, the ultimate authority rest with the DPL. So I'm not sure we *can* have a COI policy that applies to the DPL without it making a fundamental change to our governance structure. The wise DPL would delegate their authority if there wasa clear conflict of interest, of course. And if a DPL abuses their authority, then they can be voted out at the next election. But saying that the DPL "must not participate in a decision", per the ChatGPT authored statement, I would argue does't work given what trust and power we vest in the DPL. Cheers, - Ted
