Mike Bird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Saturday 23 September 2006 14:17, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The solution to this sort of situation is, again, a matter of ethics. >> As a Debian Developer, I agreed to be part of this project. To me, >> that carries an ethical obligation to make decisions for the general >> good of the project. Should I be put into a situation where I don't >> feel like I can do that without conflicts of interest, I would recuse >> myself. > Debian has to look at least one move ahead. Once conflicts of interest > are accepted with an assumption that honest people will recuse > themselves, the dynamics inevitably lead to something like the US > Congress. I don't think I've seen any project with more than a handful of people that doesn't have a potential for conflicts of interest. Debian has certainly had that potential for many, many years already, and has been dealing with that for all these years. > Non-honest people will take roles that they would not otherwise. And if > you doubt the existence of black hat programmers, take a look at my spam > folder some day. We haven't seemed to have serious problems with that so far, despite having many Debian developers who even work for companies with interests in having Debian work in particular ways that may not be best for other users of Debian. People work say up-front when they're not impartial, we work out reasonable solutions or compromises, and we get on with the business of making a high-quality operating system. This is not some scary, complex concept fraught with danger. Potential conflicts of interest arise in life all the time. They're nearly unavoidable, a natural consequence of having more than one interest and more than one affiliation in one's life. People deal with them routinely, often without needing to give them a second thought. Every time you see someone say "I really want this feature but maybe it doesn't fit the bigger picture" or "I want to make this work in Debian; what do I need to do so that it doesn't break other things I don't personally care about," you're seeing someone deal with a conflict of interest. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
