On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 13:29 -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote: > You and Mike have suggested that recruiting GCC developers is a > reasonable use of the list. Before we go to the SC, asking for approval > to change the policy, we should address some other issues: > > 1. What do we do if people do advertise jobs that are not free software > jobs, or not purely free software jobs? How pure is pure? Does "Port > GCC to proprietary OS" count as free or not? > > 2. What frequency of posting do we want to allow? > > 3. How do we enforce any of these rules? > > We already have problem (3) for the existing policy, but if we're going > to codify this, we might try to make it more formal. > > The history behind the current policy was that we decided that since > these lists are about development, and since effective development > depends on competing companies working together, we'd try to avoid > potentially polarizing commercial commentary and recruiting, e.g. "Come > work at Foo. We've got the world's best GCC peopl; much better than > those at Bar." That kind of thing is perfectly reasonable for normal > hiring ads, but obviously inappropriate here. > > I'm not opposed to opening up our policy, but I rather wonder if we > shouldn't just use the FSF's job board (which already meets FSF > requirements and is policed by the FSF), and then just allow people to > post links here, when a new job is posted there, or some such. In that > model, I don't know how to solve the enforcement issue, but we could > post a policy next to the descriptions of the lists. I'd rather not open the door to job postings, even for GCC or other free software work. There's more appropriate venues for such communication. Plus I really don't want to have to sort out the issues you've noted above.
The no job postings on gcc lists is clear, simple and easy to understand. If abused we have the ability to block postings and with the easy to understand policy, abuse is easy to identify. Now, if we want to have a pointer to the FSF job board, that might be a reasonable thing to do. We could even have an automated monthly (or whatever frequency) message to point folks to the FSF job board and remind everyone of the policy. jeff
