On 02/11/2009 01:38 AM, Ian G:
I thought about that too, but discarded it. Certainly some CA input is useful, but the danger is that it becomes overbearing and selfserving, and could lead to some form of tit-for-tat war between the CAs (assuming that there are multiple rounds of reviews, which we would probably all agree is a good thing).
It's perhaps an opportunity for me to explain why I'm here and why I think others - specially representatives and employees of CAs - should too. Of course I also represent StartCom at times when it's relevant - my signature clearly shows my affiliation. As such, StartCom is also a member at various other open source and open standards projects, therefore my participation here isn't unique per se.
Personally I believe that CAs have an interest that policies for inclusions at the browsers are upheld. Also I believe that people working at CAs have the best knowledge in reviewing and advising on these matters. For example, I viewed the contributions made by Rob & Robin of Comodo and other CAs as entirely positive. The experience and knowledge Kathleen brought with her as an ex-employee of a CA just confirms that knowing about the inner procedures, actual practices and some real-world experience at a CA is almost necessity. Myself didn't had to make too many reviews either in order to realize that my contribution is rather important to the overall inclusion process - I'm just sorry that I didn't started with it earlier.
Tit-for-tat wars aren't really relevant when there are no deficiencies. If there are deficiencies, they must be dealt with accordingly and it doesn't matter if it's a CA (or employee of a CA) participating here or not. The same policy and same rules apply for all CAs equally. :-) Important is, and because of the sensitivity, that the judgment and final decisions are made by the responsible person Mozilla assigned for this task. This has been Frank and at times Gerv so far.
A similar situation applies to code and other contributions too. There are various commercial organizations contributing code, patches and services to Mozilla, some of which obviously serves their own interests too - sometimes it's even exclusive. Those contributors are most capable in leading development and contributing towards the various projects and components. There are module owners, reviewers and drivers - sometimes those positions are even held by contributors which work at commercial organizations not affiliated with Mozilla. Because of that, I think that the participation of CAs and their employees as community members is no precedence and highly useful in my opinion.
-- Regards Signer: Eddy Nigg, StartCom Ltd. Jabber: start...@startcom.org Blog: https://blog.startcom.org -- dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
