Re: Banning Norbert Preining from planet.d.o

[Paul Tagliamonte]

I was also very very surprised to hear we allow members removed
because of their toxic behavior still allowed to use project resources
to amplify the very things that got them removed in the first place.

No idea why we wouldn't have removed the blog of anyone expelled from
planet.d.o as part of that action. It seems wholly inappropriate to
keep any expelled member of Debian's blog on the planet.


On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 11:02 AM Wouter Verhelst  wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 02:51:10PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 08:38:02AM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> > > > Can we delete him from planet?
> > >
> > > Any DD can do that... oh wait that includes me... done!
> >
> > I went bold and reverted this removal; the detailed reason why and the
> > Planet rules I believe Jonathan has breached are in the commit message.
>
> I'm not going to play commit ping pong, but why do you think it is
> appropriate to continue to have someone on Planet Debian whom we have
> banned from the project, and whose appeal for that ban was rejected?
>
> Honestly, I was surprised to learn he still *was* on Planet. I don't
> think it makes any sense at all to keep people on Planet Debian who we
> threw out for cause.
>
> --
>  w@uter.{be,co.za}
> wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}
>


-- 
:wq

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes

[Paul Tagliamonte]

Hello, Debianites,

Allow me, if you will, to talk a bit about something that's been on my mind
a bit over the last handful of years in Debian. It's something that's pretty
widely circulated in particular circles, but I don't think I've seen it on
a Debian list before, so here's some words that I've decided to put together.


I've intentionally not drawn lines to the 'discussions' going on (or the
'discussions' in the past I could point to) to avoid getting dragged into more
thrash, so if you reply, please do try to keep this clear of any specific
argument that you feel this may or may not apply to. This is a more general
note that I think could use some thought from anyone who's interested.


During World War II, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)[1] distributed a
manual[2] (the Simple Sabotage Field Manual), which was used to train
"citizen-saboteur" resistance fighters, some of whom were told, not to pick up
arms, but to confound the bureaucracy by tying it up with an unmanageable
tangle of "innocent" behavior.

While no one is working within the Debian community member attempting to
subvert us sent from the shady conglomerate of nonfree operating systems by
following this playbook, this playbook is an outstanding illustration of how
some innocent behavior can destroy the effectiveness of an organization.  It's
effective, precisely *because* it's not overly malicious, and these behaviors
-- while harmful -- are explainable or innocent. Section (3) covers this in
detail.

Most of the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual covers things like breaking
equipment or destroying tanks, but section (11) is "General Interference with
Organizations and Production". I'm just going to focus here.

Let's take a look at section (11):

> (1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts
> to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
>
> (2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.
> Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal
> experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" 
> comments.
>
> (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and
> consideration." Attempt to make committees as large as possible -- never
> less than five.
>
> (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
>
> (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
>
> (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to
> re-open the advisability of that decision.
>
> (7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow co-conferees to
> be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or
> difficulties later on.
>
> (8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision - raise the question of
> whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of
> the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher
> echelon.

I won't go through each of these point-by-point since everyone reading this is
likely sharp enough to see how this relates to Debian (although I will point
out I find it particularly interesting to replace "patrotic" here with the
Debian-specific-patriotism -- Debianism? -- and re-read some of the more
heated threads)



I have a theory of large organizations I've been thinking a lot about that came
from conversations with a colleague, which is to think about an organization's
"metabolic overhead" -- i.e., the amount of energy that an organization
devotes to intra-organization communication. If you think about a car
manufacturing plant, the "metabolic overhead" is all the time spent on things
like paperwork, communication, planning. It's not possible (or desirable!) for
an organization to have 0% overhead, nor is it desirable (although this one *is*
possible) to spend 100% time on overhead. I think it *may* be possible to get
to above 100% overhead, if workplace contention spills out into drinks after
work.

All of the points in the OSS Simple Sabotage Manual are things designed to
increase the metabolic overhead of an organization, and to force organization
members to spend time *not* doing their core function (like making cars,
running trash pickup or ensuring the city has electricity), but rather, spend
their time litigating amongst themselves as the core function begins to
become harder and harder to maintain. This has the effect of degrading the
output/core function of an organization, without any specific cause
(like a power loss, etc).

I'd ask those who are reading this to consider how this relates to their time
spent in Debian. Is what you find something you're happy about with a hobby
project you're choosing to spend your free time on? Are you taking actions to
be a good participant?



To do a bit of grandstanding myself, do remember that it's not just your time
here -- when we spend significant resources litigating and playing bureaucracy
games, we spend 

Re: Standing behind GNOME Foundation against Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

Aye aye! We should distribute a fundraising site more widely among Debian
for anyone in our community who is willing to donate to the collective
defense of our tools.

paultag

On Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 8:28 PM Norbert Preining 
wrote:

> On Sat, 28 Sep 2019, Chris Lamb wrote:
> > that the Debian Project would publically stand with the GNOME
> > Foundation against this attack on a cherished sister project of ours
> > and, by extension, on free software in general?
>
> Totally agreed, thanks a lot.
> I have invested lots of code into Shotwell over the years, and it hurts
> to see these patent trolls.
>
> Norbert
>
> --
> PREINING Norbert   http://www.preining.info
> Accelia Inc. + IFMGA ProGuide + TU Wien + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Dev
> GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
>
>

Re: Debian Linux VPAT

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, May 03, 2017 at 10:17:10AM -0400, Alexander III, Paul R. (BAH) wrote:
>Good Morning,
> 
> 
>The Department of  Veteran Affairs Section 508 Office, is currently
>reviewing COTS products that they are currently using (or a request
>internally for purchase/use has been made) to ensure that the products
>are Section 508 conformant. Your product, Debian Linux, has been
>identified as one that the Department of the Veterans Affairs is using.
>Can you please send information available, such as, a Voluntary Product
>Accessibility Template (VPAT) or product description regarding Section
>508?

Hey there Paul!

I see a 202 number -- are you in VACO or 1800? I can stop by. Email me off-list.

508 isn't an issue for Debian as VA uses it - it's used as a server
operating system, and the UI is *not* provided by Debian. The webapps
running on it would be subject to 508, but this is the systems
administrator facing, terminal based operating system.

Thanks!
  Paul

> 
> 
>Thank you for your assistance in your products evaluation.
> 
> 
>Paul R. Alexander III
> 
>Section 508 Auditor
> 
>202-461-8837
> 
>Department of Veteran Affairs

-- 


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Re: Debian slogan / tag line / emphasizing freedom

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2016 at 12:22:51PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> Make Debian Great Again.

Because a few people seem confused, this is the slogan of the U.S.
reality TV star turned politician Donald Trump.

This is clearly a joke, and I doubt Adam was aligning himself with Mr.
Trump's views on how he'd make America "Great Again".

Cheers,
  Paul


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Re: third-party packages adding apt sources

[Paul Tagliamonte]

[cc'ing devel, since this is a rant that involves technical topics, and
 god knows I only go on so many rants a year these days]

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 05:18:28PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> b) many upstreams appear frustrated about getting their package
> officially supported in Debian.

Yeah, I don't think that's it. "officially supported" is burrying a lot
of really important discussion we're not having.

> Sometimes there is good reason their
> package doesn't belong in Debian but sometimes it is more about inertia
> in Debian or the upstream isn't aware about backports and thinks their
> package will be stuck at a particular version forever

Frankly, I have a hell of a lot of sympathy for this.

Backports are a whole thing. People have to be actively aware of them.
Users have to be told to add a new thing in the sources by hand, and
install something explicitly. It's calories, and explaining a Debian
process to a user isn't fun. Why would upstreams want to do this?


My claim, as I'll outline below, is, if the upstream wants to give the
user an up-to-date software package, and they have to teach them how to
add a new archive, they'll give them an archive *they control*, because
they're now on the hook for delivering through that channel. Upstream
wants to spend as little time as they can with this, so they make it
easy - they make a deb.


Now, for the rant I promised.


Backports are present when a package is in testing, and backports are a
single channel. Backports are not for upstream's releases, whenever they
want to ship a thing.

We have zero procedure in place for the following:

  - Totally unsupported very old version of ${FOO} in stable, maintainer
isn't patching bugs, bugs are going to upstream, and upstream is
annoyed Debian has out of date, perhaps insecure thing X.

  - Leaf package ${BAR} has a robust upstream community, where releases
are very well tested, with a mature stable/unstable release cycle.
Our stable release freeze was off by a few months, so we've been
shipping their 'oldstable' in our 'stable' for years. The
maintainers are annoyed we don't use the latest stable in our
stable.


We can talk about what is an isn't right all day long, or about how PPAs
are going to solve all this one day, but I've become more and more
worried that we're failing to serve users in this way.

Largely, I think the first situation is a common one that our culture
has forced people to group-think "Well, that's bad and the system is
working as intended". We can't let software change on our stable
installs, so this situation is bad, but the intent of stable.

The second one is harder to say that with, since upstream is making
assertions (just as strong as us) on some things. Be it protocol
stability, API stability, or whatever.

We're mostly approximating #2 by stacking up patches from their next
stable, and applying them to our stable. We're basically shipping the
new version with the old version number, without as much testing as the
real version, and only confusing ourselves (patches are a bitch), users
(I have version 1.2), and upstreams (why doesn't Debian trust the
release process), causing tension everywhere. Look at OpenSSL, it's
nuts. (God bless the OpenSSL team for doing this, and finding a way to
keep DDs happy -- or rather -- merely quiet, as well as upstreams and
users).

So, your question, why do people try to make it easy to get the latest
stable software is answered simply with "because we're not". We are the
problem. No one wants to do this. Maintianing an archive sucks. No one
wants to maintain a Debian archive. It's just the least work to deliver
something supportable and maintainable to users.

Go to any mature project, they have a way to bypas the archive, and get
the latest stable from upstream. This is a huge failure. Upstreams
aren't becoming DDs and updating packages, dispite the fact they can
package and maintain things.

Hell, teams packaging Mozilla-soft and PostgreSQL are DDs maintaining
*external archives* because it's easier.

The issue is, we have a model of software delivery that's slowly growing
more and more distant from the realities of shipping software today. Why
is this? What can we do? What do our users want? What do our users
*expect*?

Making it hard to install a new archive will only lead to more
workarounds, more FAQs telling users to dismiss warnings, and more
upstreams hell-bent on working against us, because we keep making their
lives harder.


This is a 100% larger conversation, and it's not about a hacky deb, it's
about how our place in the software ecosystem has been evolving, and we
need to evolve with it, or we'll find ourselves part of the problem we
were trying to solve in the first place.


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Re: Re: Would you agree - Debian is for the tech savvy

[Paul Tagliamonte]

Replying with my fluxbox hat on, and perhaps Debian too.

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 09:07:10PM -0500, Stephan Foley wrote:
> > Why wasn't it enough to run these two commands?
> > apt-get install xorg
> > apt-get install fluxbox

Yeah, Fluxbox is still not that out of the box. It's always required a
lot of fiddling to set up. Fluxbox has a lot of ups, but it also has
some downs (it requires manual configuration and is very minimal)

> grrr
   And this is why I don't tell people to "just" install Fluxbox.

> Well, first off, I had to figure out the best display manager. Then, install
> Fluxbox and you got some ugly styling! Then, I had to figure out how to
> config all the gtk stuff and fonts, etc. Then, of course, no sound. And how
> about auto mounting external drives, etc, etc! Or even just artwork for grub
> and lightdm.
> 
> Now I can install the whole thing in about 10 minutes, but it was quite a
> chore to do it the first time...coming from a system like Crunchbang which
> was configured with style and grace, I realized how much work when into
> that.

Well, patches to add some defaults in an external package is super
welcome :)

> On the other hand, Fluxbox really is just a windows manager and it needs a
> ton of helper packages...nothing like Gnome or KDE.

That's right.

Cheers,
  Paul


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Re: Software Freedom Conservancy needs our cash

[Paul Tagliamonte]

I also donate as a supporter. Anyone that can, should!

  Paul
On Dec 1, 2015 8:18 AM, "Ian Jackson" 
wrote:

> As reported here:
>   https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
>
> Conservancy is an amazingly good thing.  They are the only
> organisation doing GPL enforcement for non-FSF projects.  They are
> facing financial problems because one of their major donors has
> withdrawn.  Conservancy's determination to make the GPL stick, by
> lawsuit if necessary, is not popular amongst rich corporates.
>
> I have just signed up.  I think any Debian contributor who believes in
> copyleft, and can afford it, should probably sign up too.
>
> If, like me, you work on copylefted software in your day job, or you
> hope to do so in the future, the GPL is for you not just an important
> tool to help change the world, but also an assurance of your personal
> autonomy.
>
>
> Could Debian as a project sign up ?  Conservancy is a 503(c), like
> SPI, so perhaps we in Debian could commit a modest regular funding
> stream to Conservancy.
>
> Debian depends heavily on GPL'd software and most of the
> Debian-specific tools we have written over the years are copyleft.  We
> depend on our copyleft being enforced to ensure that all users of
> Debian (including users of Debian derivatives) have the freedoms that
> our community (and our Social Contract) promise.
>
> Debian's presence in the list of sponsors would be valuable as an
> example, too.
>
>
> Ian.
>
>

Re: Why are in-person meetings required for the debian keyring?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 08:36:54PM +, Philip Hands wrote:
 Nikolaus Rath nikol...@rath.org writes:
 ...
  Following that argument, I think a key should be signed and included in
  the Debian keyring if it (the key) has a history of high quality
  contributions. Meeting the keyholder in person to look at his passport
  doesn't seem to add anything of particular value here. Why would I care
  under what name he has been contributing?

 The thing it's trying to add is some assurance that, if it were
 necessary to eject someone from the project for whatever reason, that it
 is at least moderately hard for them to sneak back in under a different
 name.

I agree with Philip (as usual), but it's also the standard that we hold
ourselves to when signing someones OpenPGP key -- I can't assert
someone's identity matches without meeting them.

-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org  |   Proud Debian Developer
: :'  : 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352  D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87
`. `'`  http://people.debian.org/~paultag
 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt


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Re: similarities between logos for CLUSTER and Debian

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 12:02:31PM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
 Personally, I've been more confused by the swirl which is the current
 Dreamwidth favicon;

Yeah, but it doesn't add confusion to the marketplace. For instance, if
you went out and bought something you thought was Debian, but it was
really Windows, because Windows was selling Windows 11.0 Debian, with
the red swirl, that *would* add confusion. People would think they were
buying one thing, but actually got another.

In this case, you're confused because two websites have similar logos.
Not confusing enough for trademarks :)

 it's in a more similar style, and a more similar
 color, it simply happens to be swirling in the opposite direction. I've
 mistaken it for the Debian-logo favicon, and vice versa, more than once
 while trying to find a particular open tab.
 
 I don't think even that much similarity is enough to make it a trademark
 violation, though. If nothing else, Debian and Dreamwidth are in very
 different businesses. ^_^

Right :)

-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org  |   Proud Debian Developer
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`. `'`  http://people.debian.org/~paultag
 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt


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Re: Sponsoring a Tails hackfest?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

Huge +1. Wow. Really positive thread. We need more of these.

T
On May 3, 2014 5:56 AM, Stefano Zacchiroli z...@debian.org wrote:

 On Sat, May 03, 2014 at 08:43:07AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
  Given that:
 [snip]
  I am planning to allocate 5000 EUR.
  Comments?

 +1

 In addition to the good reasons above, I'd also like to add that Tails
 is also being *exemplar* in how to be a good derivative citizen, see for
 example:

   https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/02/msg01186.html
   https://tails.boum.org/contribute/how/debian/

 Keep up the good work,
 --
 Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
 Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
 Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
 « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

Re: keybase.io

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 04:33:18PM +0200, Tobias Frost wrote:
 Well, this thing raises several red flags just by reading upload ...
 private key. This alone smells very wrong, because I'm the opinion a
 private key must never leave my (trusted) system) 

More than that, it's good practice to never let the private half leave
an offline machine, and use that offline high-entropy machine issue
signing subkeys which you can take with you on your other machines.

I'm not doing this, but it's good practice (and I should start once I
can be bothered to generate new keys)

Cheers,
  Paul

-- 
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`. `'`  http://people.debian.org/~paultag
 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt


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Re: keybase.io

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 03:24:27PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
 Right, I strongly agree with Luca here.

I do too

 To be clear, if I spot any key
 that's both in any of the Debian keyrings and in keybase.io, I will
 proceed as if the key had been lost or compromised and immediately
 remove it from our keyring.

No, sorry. Don't do that. My key is on keybase, but *not the private
half*

It helps my friends that are getting to know OpenPGP find my key, and it
*can* be done without having the private half in there, which is the
only problem.

Thanks,
  Paul

-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org  |   Proud Debian Developer
: :'  : 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352  D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87
`. `'`  http://people.debian.org/~paultag
 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt


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Re: keybase.io

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Apr 05, 2014 at 12:57:50AM +0100, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
 2 separate points to make here (as well as the general point Russ and
 Paul have followed up with about what do we trust in general running on
 the same machine as your GPG key).

Sorry, I wrote that from my phone. My point was this attack vector
(nonfree code running on the same machine as your OpenPGP key) taken to
it's absolute extreme (wine, dropboxd) is still *not* grounds for
automated removal from the keyring.

Furthermore, the way *I* set up Keybase was to run the GnuPG commands
they requested (clearsigning and decrypting), since they looked safe and
sane (and paste the results back in a form.

 Firstly, there are 2 parts to the client side code from keybase.io, as
 far as I'm aware[0]. The first is they have an in browser implementation
 which requires your GPG private key to be stored on their server, but
 has it passphrase encrypted and all of the actual use of the key is
 through client side browser Javascript. The second is they have a
 node.js based CLI tool which runs on your personal machine and uses a
 key stored locally. This actually calls out to GPG to do the crypto.

Thirdly, you can run raw (sane and short) GnuPG commands by hand in the
terminal, pasting results back.

 The
 former I think is a bad idea (because it definitely involves giving
 keybase the private part of the key). The latter on the face of it
 sounds acceptable (as long as there's no part of the code that is
 directly manipulating the key or potentially sending it off machine) and
 doesn't seem to have any greater issue than anything else that might use
 a GPG installation.
 
 With regards to my particularly situation I have not used the keybase
 website from any machine that also has my private GPG available to it.

I have, and I seriously doubt my key has been taken.

 This is largely a factor of the way I treat my key rather than any
 special precaution I have taken around keybase. Once I get my head
 around the horror of the keybase CLI client being npm tentacles and
 pulling in a bunch of random stuff that I'm not sure I fully trust I
 will examine that set of code to convince myself that it's not going to
 leak my key anywhere and potentially try it out.

Aye. That half is Freely licensed, I believe.

https://github.com/keybase/node-client


Audits welcome, I'd very much like to be able to trust it.


Cheers,
  Paul


-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org  |   Proud Debian Developer
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Re: keybase.io

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 08:56:50PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
 Right. However, I guess that most uses of the app (other than sending
 a message saying yes I'm here, this is me) will require pasting the
 key. Or not? Keybase users, please enlighten me: What do you do with
 it besides just existing on teh graph?

I'm not a keybase user; actually, oddly enough, I'm a bit of a critic
(or rather, 1990s linux user) with my friends about it (RE: private half
usage), so I've not been able to use all of it's features - I just think
Keybase was getting a bad rap.

Being on the graph is why I'm on it - so that people who do use the
keybase CLI can talk about me (or rather: my Key) by the abstract (and
easy to remember name) 'paultag'.

That's about as far as it goes for me, so I don't know much more, but
I wouldn't dismiss the graph as a trivial thing.

A strong network effect in the OpenPGP world is nothing but great for
us, again, even if this site isn't technically perfect (which I don't
think anyone is claiming)


Cheers,
  Paul

-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org  |   Proud Debian Developer
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Re: Proposal - preserve freedom of choice of init systems

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 12:35:15PM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
 Kurt Roeckx writes (Re: Proposal - preserve freedom of choice of init 
 systems):
  On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 11:01:16AM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
   If you're going to say we need to replace the TC resolution is
   amended with something like we wish that instead the TC had decided
   blah, then please reconsider.  That would force the GR to avoid
   saying what its own effect is, which is unnecessarily confusing.
   Also, writing that text is very cumbersome.
  
  The text currently says it's using the TC's power to decide
  something, and so would fall under 4.1.4.  I think the intent of
  this GR is not to override the TC's decision about the default, so
  I'm currently not sure what to suggest.
 
 The TC decision of the 11th of February said:
 
   Should the project pass a General Resolution before the release of
   jessie asserting a position statement about issues of the day on
   init systems, that position replaces the outcome of this vote and is
   adopted by the Technical Committee as its own decision.
 
 This a GR proposal is a position statement about issues of the day
 (as it says in the Notes and rubric.)  It's on the subject of init
 systems.  Therefore it is covered by this wording.
 
 As a consequence, the GR replaces the outcome of the TC vote.  The GR
 text explicitly adopts the existing TC decision on the default, and
 adds to it.

Ian, I'm extremely disaspointed in this childish behavior of trying to
insert a malicious trap-door to a decision.

I'm *EXTREMELY* disaspointed in this.

I'm CC'ing DAM.

This is, at minimum:

  1) A abuse of power (inserting a backdoor in a decision)
  2) Dishonest (using an unrelated GR to turn over the default init
 decision made through a backdoor you put in)
  3) Goddamn slimy (for supporting this abuse)

I expected better of you.

DAM, I don't even know what I can suggest you do. This is a hugely
hurtful thing for Ian to do.


It sucks, because I did look up to you, Ian. I did respect your work,
and it literally pains me to find these words. As much as I disagreed, I
respected the fact you always had technical grounds.

Clearly such blatent politicking tarnishes that respect, and I'd imagine
this is becoming a popular point of view.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Proposal - preserve freedom of choice of init systems

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 05:55:14PM +, Colin Watson wrote:
 Huh?  Ian explicitly says, as does the text itself, that this proposed
 GR *adopts* the TC decision on the default init system.  It doesn't
 overturn it.

The fact there's a backdoor that was inserted that allowed him to
overturn the TC decision with a GR that mentions the word init is
absurd.

 -- 
 Colin Watson   [cjwat...@debian.org]


Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Proposal - preserve freedom of choice of init systems

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 11:16:57AM -0700, Bdale Garbee wrote:
 The part I don't understand is why reference is made to any TC decision
 at all.  Unless the objectives include overturning the decision on the
 default Linux init system for jessie, I see no reason to invoke the GR
 clause in that resolution at all.
 
 Why isn't this just a standalone GR asserting a position statement
 about issues of the day on the coupling question?

Ian's backdoor would then trigger and abort the TC decision, so he says.

 Bdale

Cheers,
  Paul


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Re: Proposal - preserve freedom of choice of init systems

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 07:21:34PM +0100, Andreas Barth wrote:
 1. the proposed GR doesn't overturn TCs decision about the default
 Linux init system, but holds that one up and adds something about
 loose coupling of init systems and packages[1]

The fact it has to be stated explicitly is insane.

 2. the possibility to overturn TCs decision was inserted *by*
 *purpose* with our the common understanding of all TC members that if
 the developers together want to overturn our decision they should be
 able to do so with normal (1:1) majority. This was part of the
 proposals with systemd as Linux default and also with upstart as Linux
 default.

... when a GR is proposed on that subject.

 I need to summarize your mails on useless escalation which I don't
 consider helpful. Sorry.

Your point of view is noted.


However, confirming the interpretation of any GR which mentions the word
init as vacating the default init TC decision is nuts. This would be a position
statement about coupling, not default init, and it seems that this is to
be interpreted as triggering the clause, as noted by it's author.

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Re: Proposal - preserve freedom of choice of init systems

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 10:42:56AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
 I think you're overreacting.

After some cool-off, I agree.

DAM, please disregard my messages. Sorry.

I'm still displeased at the reading of the language, but it's clear this isn't
a blatent abuse.

Sorry, Ian. I overreated.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Restrictions for TOR connections on Debian IRC channels

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 10:13:20PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
 The collateral damage from the #debian ban of Tor users fairly often
 asks on #debian-mentors about why they are banned, so I don't think we
 should enable the Tor ban on #debian-mentors. It would be great if the

Right now I'm getting messages like:

| 11:53  disband-tech-ctte nthykier: if I meet paul in a court of law I will 
know who he is
| 11:53  disband-tech-ctte and then I will kill him, God willing.
| 11:54  disband-tech-ctte so go and report away
| 11:54  disband-tech-ctte paultag: you come into the real world and touch me 
I
|will cut your fingers off and then burn you alive 
if
|I am able to.
| 11:54  disband-tech-ctte this is all words, here and now
| 11:54  disband-tech-ctte but if you bring things into the physical
|area, I'll do anything to torture you to death.
| 11:55  disband-tech-ctte nthykier: goes for you too

My poking fun at him clearly didn't help, but if he's willing to say
this, I'd rather they didn't have the chance to say this to people who
don't have thick skin.

Please do engage very liberal bans. I'm tired of seeing this nonsense
all day.

Cheers,
  Paul

-- 
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Re: [Proposal] GR: Selecting the default init system for Debian

[Paul Tagliamonte]

I'd like to raise the objection that the TC hasn't done their job yet,
and while the TC has done a great job of getting *true* technically
grounded facts out yet, we've not let the process work.

Let the TC do their work. They're coming up on a vote, and they may even
suggest a GR.


This GR is premature.


Cheers,
  Paul


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Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 06:45:50PM +0400, Sergey B Kirpichev wrote:
 Any news, current status?

None that I know. I'd be really interested in working with the FSF in a
way that helps us both out a lot, and I'd really love to get an official
endorsement. I know it'll be hard, and I know it'll require some work,
but I do have faith that it *can* be done.


zack@ was the last person to work with the FSF on this, and I've not
heard much else.

Hopefully we can make it happen :)

Cheers,
  Paul


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Re: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 07:49:37PM +0100, Dominik George wrote:
 Just out of curiosity: What's their definition of freedom anyway?
 
 Forcing the user to not use non-free software takes away their freedom,
 but probably the FSF does not get that, or they wouldn't be pushing the
 GPL so badly.

You're looking at the issue the wrong way - you're looking at it from
the Free Software is good because it helps programmers lens, not the
Free software is good because it helps users lens.

Free Software is meaningless without having free users, users that
aren't able to take control of their software are not free users,
they're slaves to the creators of the software. Permissive licensing is
good for *programmers*, since it gives *corperations* and *people* the
freedom to do stuff with the code, not the *user*. The GPL asserts that
the *users* have the freedom.

I say this as someone who licenses most of his work under the MIT/Expat
license.

 But is there any real reason behind that, apart from the religious ones?

Yes.


And for the record - Debian's guidelines are *more* strict than the
FSF's in some places, and *less* in others.

For instance, we have no issue with pointing users to non-free software,
whereas the FSF would have a huge issue with this.

We have a huge issue with the GFDL's invariant clause, the FSF clearly
doesn't.

Don't write this off as religious without understanding where we as a
project stand - we're plenty religious ourselves.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Copyright arrangements for a web project

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 11:57:59AM -0500, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
 I'd very very much prefer to do something like this for my Debian work,
 even so far as to say that it can be used under the terms of any DFSG
 free license - but I'm also perfectly cool to use {,A,L}GPL-{2,3}+ for my
 work as well.
 
 I trust Debian with license freeness, and I do also trust SPI as well.
 I'd be happy to allow them to relicense my work, or even give a list of
 licenses that it can be used under.

[Stripping SPI]

It's a snowey day, and I had a small bit of time to hack something up
(I've not thought about the language, it's not even been read twice,
feedback welcome)

/* Really Important Project for Debian - does important things.
 *
 * Copyright (C) 2013  Paul R. Tagliamonte t...@pault.ag
 * 
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
 * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
 * of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 * 
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  
02110-1301, USA.
 *
 * As an additional permission, you may use, redistribute and/or modify
 * this work under any DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) free license,
 * as interpreted by the Debian FTP Team, or the Debian Project by means
 * of General Resolution. Examples of DFSG free licenses include the GPL,
 * LGPL, AGPL, Apache 2, MIT/Expat, or CDDL. */


Now, if we want to also allow permissive use of the code is another thing, but
I really don't mind (and use Expat enough already), so I'm clearly fine with
language like this.

Cheers,
  Paul

-- 
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Re: Copyright arrangements for a web project

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 02:44:19PM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
 (This is a bit off-topic for the Debian list; I hope people won't mind
 me asking opinions here though.)
 
 I'm being asked for advice on encouraging contributions by the people
 behind a couple of community-ish websites which I use regularly.
 There's a lot of work to be done to improve the attractiveness to
 contributors, and one of the things that needs fixing is the
 licensing.
 
 It's my view that a community software project ought to use a copyleft
 licence nowadays.  But two questions arise:
 
 * It would clearly be sensible to appoint a licence steward in the
   GPLv3 sense.  If the current project leadership lack free software
   credibility, could SPI serve as licence steward ?
 
   What instructions/directions would SPI take ?  The goal would have
   to include the SPI Board making the value judgement, not just
   deferring to the project's leadership - that is, the SPI Board would
   make the decision itself in what it sees as the interests of the
   project and the free software community.
 
 * Should the project give the licence steward the power to change the
   public licence unilaterally in the future in ways other than just
   upgrading to newer versions ?  I think the answer is probably yes
   because the licensing landscape for web applications isn't settled
   yet.  Is this a good idea and how should it be done ?
 
   Ideally it would be good to avoid requiring copyright assignment to
   the licence steward.  Can this be achieved by some text in the
   standard licence rubric eg
 
 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
 modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
 published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3, or (at your
 option) any other general public free software licence publicly
 endorsed for PROJECT by Software in the Public Interest Inc
 (i.e. SPI is a proxy as described in s14 of the GNU GPLv3 but SPI
 is not limited to endorsing only future versions of the GNU GPL).
 
   (Along presumably with some Signed-off-by system for contributions.)

This is the approach KDE takes (I saw this in NEW a few times) - 

/
| Copyright year  name of author e-mail
| 
| This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
| modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
| published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
| the License or (at your option) version 3 or any later version
| accepted by the membership of KDE e.V. (or its successor approved
| by the membership of KDE e.V.), which shall act as a proxy 
| defined in Section 14 of version 3 of the license.
| 
| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
| GNU General Public License for more details.
| 
| You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
| along with this program.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
\

I'd very very much prefer to do something like this for my Debian work,
even so far as to say that it can be used under the terms of any DFSG
free license - but I'm also perfectly cool to use {,A,L}GPL-{2,3}+ for my
work as well.

I trust Debian with license freeness, and I do also trust SPI as well.
I'd be happy to allow them to relicense my work, or even give a list of
licenses that it can be used under.

 * Personally I'm an AGPLv3 proponent.  The system ought to be suitable
   for AGPLv3 provided that its submodules are AGPLv3-compatible (and
   if they aren't, then we can probably write a licence exception).
   (The main program I'm thinking of here is a Ruby on Rails
   application.)  What are people's feelings about AGPLv3 ?

I like it a lot.

 Thanks,
 Ian.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Copyright arrangements for a web project

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 06:35:05PM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
 Of course that only applies to future versions of the GNU GPL.  It's
 not possible to switch from AGPL to GPL (or the other way) with that
 wording.

Indeed, just a datapoint for what other projects do. I'd be fine to
include in my Debian software headers something to the effect of
granting folks the right to relicense under any license the ftp-masters
consider DFSG free. Of course, this leads to a documentation problem, as
I don't think there's a canoincal list. Either way, doing that leads to
new legal language, which I'm not keen to force (but would be happy to
use)

  I trust Debian with license freeness, and I do also trust SPI as well.
  I'd be happy to allow them to relicense my work, or even give a list of
  licenses that it can be used under.
 
 Debian is ill set up to make this decision for other people,
 unfortunately.  You'd have to nominate someone in particular.

Indeed, but the de-jure team that handles this is the ftp-master team,
which I'd be happy to hand control of my code's licensing to. Doubly so
for Debian-related work. Of course, they can be overruled by the
developer body, but saying anything that's been deemed DFSG free by the
project would be good enough for me :)

 Thanks,
 Ian.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Google contacting (harassing?) new DDs

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 06:14:51PM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
  it looks like as soon as one becomes DD, an email arrives from
  Google recruiters.
 
 Is it just one recruiter at Google or is it multiple people?

Many, many people. I know most of them by name now. They send out lots
of mail to Ubuntu and Debian contributors fairly regularly.

 Are they actually Google staff or is it an external agency that is
 just trying to find people who they can propose to Google and other
 employers?

Actually Google and Google employees.

[snip]

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: The tell me if I'm being stupid statement

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 10:11:01AM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
 On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 01:30:17PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
 
  Do we need explicit statements like this? I always had the impression
  that everyone feels free to ask people to improve their behaviour (at
  least in recent years) and that most people don't have a problem being
  asked to improve their behaviour.
 
 Agreed. It really should be expected to be the default, with no need of
 stating explicit consent to it.

I agree as well, however, I *have* crossed this line (and I'm sorry
about that, I really am) in the past, and I don't get much of a stop,
you're being a bit of a dick.

Since I don't mind poking people off-list about their messages, (and I
do do it, even without this little note here), I figured I'd make it
absolutely clear that I expect (nay, request!) that others do the same
to me.

I do *not* want this to be paperwork that gives permission to people
to do this, since I do agree with y'all.

I might leave it up to see how people react, I have zero problem
chalking this up to a loss :)

 In part because it sort of implies that the default is that you can't
 tell a friend if they're being stupid unless they have an explicit
 statement in the signature saying that you can.

I tried to use language that avoided implying this, I do agree the
default is to send mail, but almost no one does it.

 It would make logical sense, in this respect to have a signature saying
 Please don't tell me if I'm being stupid: I know I am[2] but I don't
 see this being usefully picked up anytime soon.

Indeed. I wasn't pushing for this to become a project-wide thing on
opting-in to the CoC, but rather, making explicit that I would prefer
strongly to hear from people, regardless of their level of activity in
Debian, when they think that I've crossed a line.


Anyway, I'm open to anything, it's just a small idea and small
experiment.

Cheers,
  Paul

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The tell me if I'm being stupid statement

[Paul Tagliamonte]

Howdy folks,

As some of the more observent folks will notice, I've updated my sig to
include a ref to the following GPG signed document:

  http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct-statement.txt

The template is up at:

  http://people.debian.org/~paultag/conduct/conduct-statement.txt


I know it's only a small gesture, but it'd be really neat if we talked
about doing this on a slightly more wide-spread scale.

Since I'm loud and post a lot, I figure I'll lease some ad-time to the
document in my sig.

If you feel the same way, feel free to sign it yourself. Or enforce it
on me. Or whatever.


Much love,
  Paul

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Re: Please update the DSA delegation

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 01:15:58AM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
 [...]
 For a team which is functioning well, it would be
 helpful if the DPL delegated to the team the authority over its own
 composition, explicitly reserving the right to intervene.
 [...]

If I remember my Debian Constitution correctly, the DPL can delegate
*developers* to preform actions they would otherwise preform, or make
decisions the DPL can't directly.

I think the only legal way to do this would be to delegate a developer
on that team the ability to re-delegate members of a team (e.g. you
can't delegate the team, you'd have to delegate a person to delegate the
team)


On a related note, I think I've set the record for delegate / email content
to date with this email.


As for if Lucas wants to do this (nay, if this is even a good idea) is
something left to the reader, I think.


Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Code of Conduct: picking up

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 12:34:24PM +, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
 «Malware, short for malicious software, is software used to disrupt
 
 See. This isn’t software. It is a perfectly valid string of
 Unicode characters.

While I personally find this cute hack hilarious, this defence is a bit
shaky. It'd be like saying SQL injection is just a valid string of
Unicode characters, or that buffer overflows are just lots of valid
data.

Valid is a subjective term :)


Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Code of Conduct: picking up

[Paul Tagliamonte]

My last post, I swear.

So, three or so people have came to me with this, so I'd like to clarify
exactly what I was intending - because, frankly, every person that yells
at me (and you all really should, please keep doing that) is proving the
point I was trying to make. Namely (full mail below):

 I wrote:

 As a Gedankenexperiment, if you were to stop posting insane things,
 we'd all be happier.
 
 You see how even this can be used as an insult or to draw comparisons?

Basically, I was saying, look, if you're going to say something that's
over the line in a hypthetical, you *need* to be able to defend the content,
*not*, say Do you know meaning of the word Gedankenexperiment? and why do
you attack me? when confronted.

This is clearly not correct, and the content, even inside such ideas,
*can* be used in a hurtful way. It's a classic mode of argument. I see
it in Politics *all* the time.

When people do mass calls, sometimes sleezy politicians will do a poll
where they suggest insane ideas and see how it affects their numbers,
such as:

  Do you support Joe for office
  Oh yes, he's great
  What if we told you that Joe did crack, would your opinion change?
  Oh of course, I don't want a congressman that does crack
  So you'd vote for Bob?
  Well yeah, of course.

(Now Joe has to go off and try to dismiss the crack claims, which makes
 him look like a lier or accept something he didn't do and get help.)

No where does anyone claim he does, but it's used to trick and
influence people.

Dismissing such claims as: 'silly everyone, this is just a
Gedankenexperiment' isn't a correct defense, so I won't do it either.

I was giving an example of this, and not well. I should have likely not
said you to make it clear that I was suggesting this is not a sound
argument pattern, rather then me personally telling Norbert to not post more
emails. I don't mind.

I don't stand by the content of that mail, and I'm sorry, but I stand by
it's point, and the following line:

 Please don't continue to defend such poor behavior.

Much love,
  Paul

-- 
 .''`.  Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org
: :'  : Proud Debian Developer
`. `'`  4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352  D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87
 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag
My last post, I swear.

So, three or so people have came to me with this, so I'd like to clarify
exactly what I was intending - because, frankly, every person that yells
at me (and you all really should) is proving the point I was trying to
make. Namely (full mail below):

 I wrote:
 As a Gedankenexperiment, if you were to stop posting insane things,
 we'd all be happier.
 
 You see how even this can be used as an insult or to draw comparisons?

Basically, I was saying, look, if you're going to say something that's
over the line, you *need* to be able to defend the content, *not*, say
Do you know meaning of the word Gedankenexperiment? and why do you
attack me? when confronted.

This is clearly not correct, and the content, even inside such ideas,
*can* be used in a hurtful way.

Dismissing such claims as: 'silly everyone, this is just a
Gedankenexperiment' isn't correct, so I won't do it either.

I was giving an example of this, and not well. I should have likely not
said you to make it clear that I was suggesting this is not a sound
argument pattern, rather then me personally telling Norbert to not post more
emails. I don't mind.

I don't stand by the content of that mail, and I'm sorry, but I stand by
it's point, and the following line:

 Please don't continue to defend such poor behavior.

Much love,
  Paul

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Re: Code of Conduct: picking up

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 06:21:21AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
 Lalalalala singing my song of sarcasm that is vital in Viennese life,
 even if people just don't get it, hahahaha.

Uh. When I first awoke, hazy from a night of late drinking, I assumed I
had slept directly through christmas (imagine my chagrin at figuring out
that I hadn't got my Mom her gift in time) and into April.

At least the weather would be better.

Now, imagine my crushing depression and confusion when I found it was not,
in fact, april 1st, but that this email was sent mid-november.

I was so looking forward to my birthday.

After re-reading it, I figured there was some joke I wasn't getting, and
was perfectly willing to disregard the ramblings that I'd just read,
crazy comparisons of Debian to the Third Reich, and insinuations that
the entire Debian ecosystem is corrupt.

After this second mail, I think reading http://www.timecube.com/ again
would be a better use of my time.

I'd advise you to stop doing this stuff, but it appears there's a
history of this really (in my opinion, *bad*) behavior, so I'll avoid
posting that.

Here it goes anyway:

Stop. You're not being productive and you're really showing the type of
behavior that the CoC works to prevent. I can understand why you don't
like the idea of the CoC, but surely you can see the benefit of more
signal to noise?

(Or not?)

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Code of Conduct: picking up

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 06:54:22AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
 Huu, where? Do you know meaning of the word Gedankenexperiment?
 If not, then why do you attack me? 

As a Gedankenexperiment, if you were to stop posting insane things,
we'd all be happier.

You see how even this can be used as an insult or to draw comparisons?
Please don't continue to defend such poor behavior.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Code of Conduct: picking up

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 07:01:24AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
 In contrast to you I have not spoken out words like
   insult
 or
   poor behaviour

Just because you do not write these words doesn't mean you don't exhibit
them.


I'm out of this nonsense, i've got productive things to do with my time.


As for the CoC, I'm happy to be a sponsor of any GR that looks similar
to it's current state. Please let me know when I can support it formally.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Proposed MBF - mentions of the word Ubuntu

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 05:40:44PM +, Sune Vuorela wrote:
 On 2013-11-08, Ian Jackson ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk wrote:
  The flipside is that when we receive lawyer letters over trademarks,
  where the trademark holder is preventing us from doing something we
  consider essential for software freedom, we rename things.
 
  Naturally we should apply that same principle for the benefit of our
  downstreams: if we discover that someone is being bullied by the
  trademark holder, we should protect them by preemptively renaming
  things.
 
 Is upstart a canonical trademark? some pieces of software in the archive
 with canonical trademarks in their names? SHould we consider renaming
 them?
 
 /Sune

Seems as though Joey is already taking the lead on this:

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/debmirror.git;a=commitdiff;h=fcd972395b0201fcde4915d282982926f0d04c56;hp=7fcdf0d225c480b386c5a1f487e68dc39b57e771

 [thinking about changing reply to curiosa@]

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Xfce by default

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 04:47:00PM +0100, Jens Schüßler wrote:
 You have to be a very stupid user who install his system new every now
 and then to be affected by a default desktop at *installation*. And you
 still have the choice to choose whatever bloated DE you want at
 installation time.

Please change your tone, this is not acceptable for Debian mailing
lists.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Should mailing list bans be published?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 04:05:05PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
 On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 10:08:42PM +, Bart Martens wrote:
 
 What do the rest of you think?
 
I suggest we keep things civil, with respect for the persons involved. 
It's really not up to Debian to harm someone's reputation, and that 
could
reflect bad on Debian's reputation.
 
   I don't understand this argument.  What harm comes to Debian's reputation
   from showing publically that we do not tolerate abusive behavior on our
   mailing list?
 
  The harm that could come to Debian's reputation is that Debian could be
  perceived as an organization that harms people's reputation by judging them 
  in
  public about their behavior on the mailing lists.
 
 Ok, thanks for explaining.  This isn't something that concerns me at all,
 but I understand that it concerns you.

Nor I. The fact of the matter is that forcing folks to think twice
before posting complete garbage to the mailing lists is nothing but
good. If we get the reputation for harming the reputations of folks
who harass and abuse others, well, fine by me -- just don't troll the
MLs.

Approaches I could support :
- post the bans with reasons on debian-private
- or maintain a list of bans with reasons in a text file on a Debian 
machine
  where DDs can read this info.
   
   I think posting this on debian-private is not as good as posting it
   publically, for some of the reasons mentioned in my original mail.  (E.g.,
   making it clear to outsiders that certain behavior will not be tolerated.)
 
  That can be made clear without harming individuals' reputations.
 
 How do you think it can be made clear?  We do have a list code of conduct
 already (http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct), but the rules
 are vague; past attempts to make them more explicit have foundered.  So
 while in theory there are other ways to make this clear, in practice it
 seems to be quite difficult.

Indeed. The I know it when I see it method isn't very good to explain
the rules; a list of behavior that caused bans would be pretty nice in
this regard.

   I don't think maintaining a list somewhere is sufficient; there should 
   be
   some notification to the project when the bans take place.
 
  I can imagine that some DDs prefer to receive notifications, which can be
  obtained by simply using diff in crontab.
 
 That would fail to provide any of the benefits outlined in my original mail.

+1 for publishing bans.

There's a line between privacy and transparency; and this isn't a
privacy issue (indeed, the lists are public) - bad behavior in public
almost warents discipline that's public, otherwise folks (such as
myself, who didn't even know there was a ban) might continue to think
that listmasters would turn a blind eye so such emails.


Happy to hear of the ban, happy to hear of this discussion; +1

Cheers,
  T

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Re: Buying hardware with Debian money

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 08:48:58PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
 On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 05:41:39PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
  B. Powerful machine for d-i development (expected cost: 1.5k-2k EUR?)
  =
 
 The estimation is a bit too large for a decent desktop machine.

Meh, I think that's about the right cost for a machine that we can
continue to use for a while. Sure we can buy cheep hardware, but I don't
think it's great to buy new hardware every other year.

1. performing more frequent d-i uploads:
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2013/10/msg00194.html
2. implementing some kind of official images with backported linux
   kernels (and possibly other needed bits from the right suite);
 
 Aren't this tasks better done on Debian server hardware instead of
 developer hardware?  Did the developer talk to DSA?

I have no objections at all to the d-i machine. I trust (if this request
is from who I hope it is) that it will be used 100% for Debian work, and
I trust their ability to use this machine to ensure Debian continues to
run smoothly.


Much love,
  Paul

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Re: Paths into Debian

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sep 24, 2013 2:37 AM, Thijs Kinkhorst th...@debian.org wrote:

 On Mon, September 23, 2013 14:46, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
  Did you tag them 'gift'?
  https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/GiftTag

 This may just be me, as it's very personal, and no offense intended at
 you, but I really detest the name 'gift' of that tag and that prevents me
 from using it.

 Tagging something 'gift' gives me a really condescending association,
 where the Big Maintainer has been so kind to hand out a 'gift' of doing
 work to the little newbie who should be grateful to receive it. Because
 these are the connotations of the word gift to me: that people should feel
 happy to receive it, while actually we should be happy if people do work
 for the project.

 I realize this is absolutely not your intention in naming this tag and
 also that it's highly subjective matter. I'm raising it only because it
 prevents me from using it. If it's just me, than that's that.

Its not just you - while I appreciate using a word other than bitesized or
low-hanging-fruit, I tend to get the same slightly off putting feeling
about gift

Not to bikeshead.

T



 Cheers,
 Thijs


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Re: Paths into Debian

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sep 24, 2013 8:03 AM, Stefano Zacchiroli z...@debian.org wrote:

 On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 07:51:53AM -0400, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
  Its not just you - while I appreciate using a word other than bitesized
or
  low-hanging-fruit, I tend to get the same slightly off putting feeling
  about gift
 
  Not to bikeshead.

 So, folks, what do you propose instead? :)

 If the chosen terminology send the wrong message, and hence it's
 potentially a blocker, let's change it (but better do it only *once*,
 hence the need of getting it right this time).

I don't want to give the wrong impression - I'll still use the chosen tag,
but if I'm to play the Umarell, I'd be most likely to use bitesize

Seriously, I don't want to get between work getting done, though.

  T


 Cheers.
 --
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 « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

Re: Can CC BY 2.0 be upgraded to 3.0 ?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 09:53:33AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
 Hi Paul,
 
 thanks a lot for the follow-up.  It is essential to have authoritative answers
 on such questions.

No problem, happy to lend a voice! (and thanks for caring about the
archive!)

 Have a nice week-end,
 
 -- 
 Charles Plessy
 Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Can CC BY 2.0 be upgraded to 3.0 ?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 01:28:19PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
 Er, I don't understand why you think this is significant.  The work formed
 by taking the original and putting it under a different license is
 trivially a derivative work.

While it's not defined to my liking in the CC* set, it defines a
derivative work as::

| Derivative Work means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work and
| other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement,
| dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound
| recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form
| in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted, except that a
| work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a
| Derivative Work for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of
| doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the
| synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image
| (synching) will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of
| this License.

I'm not convinced a relicense is considered a work based upon the work.
Just like a patch, I'd assume this to be a creative work / modification
to the work.

Not that reading 4b this way isn't creative ;)

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Can CC BY 2.0 be upgraded to 3.0 ?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 10:46:38PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
 Dear FTP team,
 
 I found #675435 where it was written that CC-BY-SA-2.0 was not suitable
 for Debian, and now I am confused.
 
 Could you let us know your position on the possiblity to accept CC-BY-SA-2.0 
 by
 upgrading it to 3.0 through its clause 4b ?

I missed this thread until I stumbled on a bug.

4b applies to derivative works only. Underscores mine.

/
| You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
| digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this
| License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements
| as this License, or a Creative Commons Commons license that contains
| the same License Elements as this License (e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike
| 2.0 Japan).
\

.. (etc) ...

As such, no. This has resulted in a few REJECTs. Folks who have uploaded
2.0 as 3.0, don't keep doing it. If it made it through NEW for some crazy
reason, please file a serious bug on your package and CC the ftpteam.


Have a nice weekend,
  Paul

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Re: Developers per country (2013)

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 10:09:53AM +1000, Craig Small wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 08:02:11PM +0300, Boris Pek wrote:
  First, let's see how the number of active developers and population are
  really related. The correlation coefficients are:
  0.10 (2013), 0.09 (2012), 0.09 (2011), 0.08 (2010).
  Very low, unfortunately. But it was predictable...

 And going lower too.

Yeah. To be expected; we don't remove members as easily as we gain them
(which is fine, IMHO), so as the project ages and people fall idle, it
brings down the numbers, without reducing the set of active people
doing good work too much :)

 
  The correlation coefficients between the number of active developers and 
  GDP:
  0.60 (2013), 0.60 (2012). Hey, it looks much better!
 So... if we want more Debian developers, try to increase a countries GDP and 
 don't
 bother with its population; perhaps.  I wonder what causes this.
 
 Thanks, I found it interesting in any case.
 
  - Craig
 
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Re: Possible trademark violation?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 08:12:16PM +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
 2013/8/7 Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo manuel.montez...@gmail.com:
  I don't know if this kind of reports is useful (probably one can find
  many such things just for ) or if this is the better place for them,
  but well,
 
 Wrong combination of keystrokes made me send the email incomplete...
 this paragraph should be:
 
 I don't know if this kind of reports is useful (probably one can find
 many such things just with a few searches in your favourite engine, so
 isolate reports like this are not very interesting?); or if this is
 the better place for them, but well, just thought that I should share
 it just in case.
 
 
 Cheers and sorry for the noise.

It's not noise at all.

A google search for:

debian it

results in this link as the top hit. I'm cc'ing trademarks.

Thanks for your report, Manuel,
  Paul

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Re: Possible trademark violation?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 03:13:32PM -0400, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
 On Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 08:12:16PM +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
  2013/8/7 Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo manuel.montez...@gmail.com:
   I don't know if this kind of reports is useful (probably one can find
   many such things just for ) or if this is the better place for them,
   but well,
  
  Wrong combination of keystrokes made me send the email incomplete...
  this paragraph should be:
  
  I don't know if this kind of reports is useful (probably one can find
  many such things just with a few searches in your favourite engine, so
  isolate reports like this are not very interesting?); or if this is
  the better place for them, but well, just thought that I should share
  it just in case.
  
  
  Cheers and sorry for the noise.
 
 It's not noise at all.
 
 A google search for:
 
 debian it
 
 results in this link as the top hit. I'm cc'ing trademarks.
 
 Thanks for your report, Manuel,
   Paul

[for followups, it's trademark@ not trademarks@]


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Re: Proposal #3: Upstream/Debian Project donations (was: PaySwarm-based donations)

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 12:35:36PM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
 Sorry, I cannot look at this donations proposal but as a deep failure
 waiting to happen.

While I am warry, I don't think we should mock or block those wishing to
build this system to help aid Debian.

Cheers,
   Paul


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Re: Proposal #3: Upstream/Debian Project donations (was: PaySwarm-based donations)

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 01:45:49PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
 Personally, economic incentives have very little to do with why I work on 
 Debian.  Fundamentally, if I was here for the money, Debian couldn't afford 
 me.  

Ditto, that's not the issue here - this wouldn't be funding
*developers*, it would be going to general support to run our machines,
or get us developers together, so we don't have to spend our personal
savings on such things.

Which I think would be a nice thing, JFTR.

I am against developers expecting to get paid, and yes, a 5 buck tip for
a 5 hour bugfix is hardly my going rate, I'd rather a thank you, but
paying for my coffee is a nice gesture that I'd be happy to encourage.

 While I understand the desire to build up the economic system around FOSS so 
 that more people can afford to participate more, but there's also a risk that 
 if participation is monetized, those who aren't here for the money will be 
 demotivated.

I quite agree with you.

 
 Scott K


Cheers,
  Paul



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Re: Doing something about should remain private forever emails

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 10:49:55PM +0200, Raphael Geissert wrote:
 At present, new DDs can access emails that were sent to -private years ago. 

I've read such emails, just to get an idea of what's been sent, to
figure out what the heck private is for, really (when I was a green DD).
I mean, I don't really see a problem with that, if we trust them to be
on private, we should trust them to respect that, regardless of when the
mail was sent.

 People who might (or might not) be a member of the project and sent an email 
 may not necessarily agree to that. Or a less controversial example: put 
 simply, if an unauthorised person gets a hand on master.d.o there is no hope 
 for those messages.
 

[..]

 previous one, so that only one tarball exists in master.d.o. Access to old 

So, to get mail from 2 years ago, you have to decompress every tarball
between now and then?

 Comments?

Interesting idea!
  Paul

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Re: Slowdown problem of a Debian package

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 02:15:25AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
 The only way to override a maintainer's decision is through the
 Technical Committee http://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte.

In addition to this great advice, I'd also like to add what's inferred
by this remark - ron is actively maintaining the package, and keeping an
eye out for stability -- and to be completely fair, I'd have likely made
the same decisions as he did, when he made them.

Now, in post-freeze, I'd likey re-evaluate them myself, but ron is free
to take the action he deems best, and is actively maintaining this
package, AFAICT.


Hopefully this will be resolved and y'all can collaborate more,
  Paul

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Re: KickStarter for Debian packages - crowdfunding/donations for development

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 11:48:27AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
 On 14-06-13 23:24, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
  Right, but this leads to one of two things:
  
- No money is shared with dependencies (leading to people flocking to
  awesomewm, gnome, kde, chrome, wine, apache2, etc)
  
- Money is shared with dependencies (leading to people flocking to
  gcc, linux, libc6)
 
 Which is a problem, why?

Because, given a naive implementation, people could latch on and feed
off all the money trickling in without doing work. Unless you want to
rate people in Debian, which I think is a very bad idea.

Oh you? You're worth 1%. You? Oh, you get nothing. Kbai.

 - The maintainer(s) decide to put all the money in a fund that is used
   for things like meetings among the package's maintainers. In other
   words, there is no direct financial benefit to be had, and thus I
   don't expect people to be interested in joining purely for financial
   benefit.

This would be a nice result of this system. Very very nice. I would love
if donations for a package went to a single discretionary fund to help
them with development. Things like:

  - going to upstream development sprints
  - meeting in a central location for a sprint
  - [other brilliant ideas here]

 - The maintainer(s) set up some complex scheme by which financial
   benefit is equally distributed among contributors based on size of

I think this is a can of worms we should very much avoid.

[..]

 Unless you think money is dirty, I don't see how any of this would
 involve flocking in a problematic manner.

I don't think it's dirty, but it distorts views. When the person next to
you doing less work than you is making $MONEY, and you're not, you don't
want to work on $THING anymore.

 Am I missing something?

No, just not looking in the same places as me.

 If/when this were to happen in Debian, I think it would be fair to kick
 said developer out of the project, on the basis of them violating the
 do not stand in the way rule of constitution §2.1.1.

He claimed he'd not stand in the way of anyone writing their own patch,
and I don't think you could claim not writing the patch is standing in
the way, so I think this doesn't apply.

It's shady, but I don't think we have a mechinism for enforcing people
don't do this. Having a big-professional system where you say Oh, just
apt-donate me $10 usd and I'll release this patch, people would believe
this is how things work.


Cheers,
   Paul


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Re: KickStarter for Debian packages - crowdfunding/donations for development

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 11:03:36PM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
[..]
 work. That's all fine. We have a mechanism in place to help people
 donate money to Debian as a whole. That's also fine. But I'd very much
 rather keep both things separate — Not instate mechanisms in Debian to
 get funds to individual developer. We have never needed it, and from
 the discussions I have taken part in or witnessed, I really doubt we
 would need it now.


In particular, I have concerns on how people *collect* this money. In
the case of a package maintainer, we don't require we know who they are,
nor their legal name, or even where the live. Just an active, working
email and good changes that we can upload (hell, they could even just
get sponsorship via debdiffs without a GPG key for all we know). In that
case, verifiying identity wouldn't be something we could do, nor do I
think such people would give their bank numbers up.


I think allowing users to 'tip' would be nice, but it creates this
system where now everyone wants to co-maint gcc, bash, libc, linux and
not really do anything.


Payment systems in general tend to lead to paybullying, which is
something I'd really (really) like to avoid. I've always loved how
un-corporate the Debian community is.


I'm very lukewarm about this right now, but I think with some sound
arguments, I'd warm up to it.


P.S., I do like your work on JSON-LD, Manu!

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: KickStarter for Debian packages - crowdfunding/donations for development

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 05:14:27PM -0400, Manu Sporny wrote:
 I agree, which is why the payment details live completely outside the
 Debian systems. The only thing you'd need to initiate payment is an
 e-mail address, or a PaySwarm financial account address, which looks
 like this:
 
 https://dev.payswarm.com/i/manu/accounts/public-account

Interesting. So one would have to set up a payswarm instance to collect,
or piggy back on a public instance?

 requirements when you process payments; know your customer (KYC) is one
 of them. There are also anti-money laundering regulations that you must
 ensure you follow to comply with the law. All of these things are things

Which law? US law? We're an international org, are the laws standard
worldwide? We have Developers in every jurisdiction you can imagine :)

 that the Debian project doesn't want to (or have to) deal with wrt. the
 current proposal.
 
  I think allowing users to 'tip' would be nice, but it creates this 
  system where now everyone wants to co-maint gcc, bash, libc, linux 
  and not really do anything.
 
 Right, which is why one solution is making it up to the package
 maintainers and software authors to figure out how payments should be
 split up. I think we all agree that tips should be distributed based on
 merit and that the maintainers have a pretty good idea of how that
 should go. In the event that the maintainers and upstream can't come to
 an agreement, they could always just opt to send the donation upstream
 to the Debian Project.

Right, but this leads to one of two things:

  - No money is shared with dependencies (leading to people flocking to
awesomewm, gnome, kde, chrome, wine, apache2, etc)

  - Money is shared with dependencies (leading to people flocking to
gcc, linux, libc6)

In both cases, Debian Project Members (non-uploading / non-maintainers)
don't get any love either. We could use pseudo-packages to help (e.g.
donate www.debian.org $1,000,000), but I can't imagine that's complete
(we'd never donate gsoc-team-alpha $500, for instance).

In the case where we do always split it, it kills a bit of the motivation
for tipping packages in general.


  Payment systems in general tend to lead to paybullying, which is 
  something I'd really (really) like to avoid. I've always loved how 
  un-corporate the Debian community is.
 
 I agree that we really don't want that. Any suggestions about how we
 might be able to avoid it?

I'm not sure, but I've seen at least one high-profile F/OSS project
maintainer (with project email, writing from it) saying I've written a
patch for this bug, it's done, but you need to give me money before I
release it. Putting an official system into place might make this more
common / easier to make look official.

 Let me know if the above makes sense. I'd be happy to answer more
 questions if it would help. :)

Thank you! :)

 
  P.S., I do like your work on JSON-LD, Manu!
 
 Thanks! Fun fact: We built JSON-LD because of PaySwarm. We needed to
 make sure that the core financial protocol could be extensible in a
 distributed way, and JSON-LD ended up being the solution for that.

Neat!

 
 You can see how JSON-LD is used for the PaySwarm financial protocol and
 digital receipts here:
 
 https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/payswarm-part-2/
 
 https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/web-payments-with-payswarm-purchasing-part-3-of-3/
 
 -- manu
 
 -- 
 Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
 Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
 blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
 http://blog.meritora.com/launch/


Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: Squeeze closer to the stars (Re: Debian GNU/Linux at NASA international space station laptops)

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 10:54:49PM -0400, Filipus Klutiero wrote:
 On 2013-05-08 22:03, Filipus Klutiero wrote:
 On 2013-05-08 21:48, Paul Wise wrote:
 On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:15 AM, Andre Felipe Machado wrote:
 
 Read more about why NASA migrated the ISS laptops to Debian GNU/Linux:
 
 http://www.zdnet.com/to-the-space-station-and-beyond-with-linux-714958/
 https://identi.ca/notice/100889633
 http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/publicity/dpn/en/current/index.wml?view=co
 
 
 Wow... it's too bad wheezy didn't leave quite enough space to squeeze in 
 that announcement while squeeze was still the Star!
 
 Paul Tagliamonte has contributed a pun more suited for a PR: 
 https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/05/msg00025.html

Feel free to use it for a debbits post or whatever :)

Cheers,
  T

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Re: Registering the Debian Logo as our trademark?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

 that have a
  singular graphical identify, pretty much all have a registered
  graphical trademark, with the exception of the GNU project's gnuhead
  logo. (However, FSF does still treat it as a trademark
  http://www.gnu.org/graphics/agnuhead.html)
 
  What do people feel about proceeding with this registration?
 
  Thanks,
  Brian
 
  [1] - http://www.debian.org/trademark
 -- 
 Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Ph.D.
 http://neuro.debian.net http://www.pymvpa.org http://www.fail2ban.org
 Senior Research Associate, Psychological and Brain Sciences Dept.
 Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
 Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834   Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
 WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik
 
 
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Re: Registering the Debian Logo as our trademark?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 04:58:27PM -0400, Brian Gupta wrote:
 On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org wrote:
  On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 04:04:34PM -0400, Brian Gupta wrote:
  Hi all,
 
  I have been helping to field trademark inquiries for Debian since late
  February, and the issue of our Logo has come up a number of times.
 
  Currently, our logo is not a registered Trademark, but is considered
  (and treated by our current Trademark policy) as a common law
  trademark, in that we have been using it to represent Debian for many
  years, and many people see it and recognize it as Debian's logo.
 
  I know there have been discussions in the past about moving forward
  with officially registering the logo, but these discussions seem to
  have not ended with a clear decision or agreement one way or another,
  hence the status quo of unregistered common law trademark.
 
  Generally speaking, as a matter of law, it would be better if we
  registered our logo as our Trademark. We had also gotten advice from
  our legal counsel (SFLC) encouraging us to do so.
 
  I don't believe any changes would be required to our Trademark policy
  to accomodate the change from common law to registered trademark,
  we'd just have the benefit that we'd have an easier time protecting
  it, if we ever found a need to do so.
 
  Here is the Debian Trademark Policy 2.0 [1] guidance on using logos:
 
  Note guidelines. We don't actually restrict use.
 
 
  Guidelines for Using Logos
 
  - Any scaling must retain the original proportions of the logo.
  - Do not use the Debian logos as part of your company logo or product
  logo or branding itself. They can be used as part of a page describing
  your products or services.
  - You need not ask us for permission to use logos on your own website
  solely as a hyperlink to the Debian project website.
 
  Some may wonder if Registering our logo as a trademark is possible
  with the logo under a fairly liberal Free Software license. The answer
  is yes, as Copyrights are a different set of rights than Trademark.
  Bear in mind or Logo is already one of our Trademarks, we just don't
  have it registered.
 
  Another question that one might raise is, What if the USPTO rejects
  our logo as too simple, and not creative enough? In answer, this is
  not a criteria for acceptance. If the mark is distinctive, and unique,
  and isn't already registered, it doesn't really matter how simple or
  complex a design is. e.g. - Think of the Nike Swoosh.
 
  I would like to work to address what I perceive to be a bug, and get
  our logo official registered. I spoke to leader@ (Lucas) about this,
  and he said that I should first start a dicussion on -project laying
  out the pros and cons, with examples of what other similar projects
  are doing.
 
  Pros:
  -
  - Makes it easier, legally speaking, to protect our trademark, if it
  ever came to it
 
  We really can't. It's now DFSG free. Folks can, legally speaking, do
  anything with it, now. There's still the restricted-use logo, which was
  left as-is, ISTR.
 
  - When companies are doing trademark searches for logos in the
  trademark database, they would be discouraged from using our logo, as
  it is would be in the database.
  - If a company tries to register a logo trademark that is the same as
  ours, the USPTO should not allow it, since it is in their database. (I
  say should, as mistakes can happen)
 
  Cons:
  -
  - Filing costs of ~$700
  - Labor/work required to file (With assistance from SFLC, I am willing
  to do much of the work required.)
  - Required extra coordination with SPI
  - If someone has already filed our logo as a trademark, we will be
  forced into a situation where we need to deal with that. (I have
  already done a preliminary search of the USPTO database, and found no
  such occurrences, so feel this risk is minimal.)
  - In order to maintain the status of a federally registered trademark,
  the owner must file a statement of continued use and later, a renewal
  application. (Again more work, which I am willing to do.)
 
  Other projects that have registered their logo:
  ---
  - Apache - Many trademarks, including the feather
  http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/list/
  - OpenOffice - Seagull logo
  http://www.openoffice.org/marketing/art/galleries/logos/
  - Gentoo Linux - G logo http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/name-logo.xml
  - Fedora - Multiple logos 
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Logo/UsageGuidelines
  - Drupal CMS - Druplicon logo http://drupal.org/node/9068
  http://drupal.com/trademark
  - Gnome - Gnome Foot http://www.gnome.org/foundation/legal-and-trademarks/
  - Mozilla - Multiple logos (Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla)
  http://blog.mozilla.org/press/media-library/
  - KDE - KDE and the K Desktop Environment logos
  http://techbase.kde.org/Template:KDE_Trademark_Notice
 
  Do any of these also have a DFSG free logo? I know

Re: Debian participation into GNOME Outreach Program for Women

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Thu, Apr 04, 2013 at 04:35:15PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
 Le Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 09:32:47AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit :
  
  If not, we can do mission-specific fund raising, I wouldn't mind that
  either, as we do something similar for, say, DebConf already. It
  wouldn't be possible, in my opinion, to raise all the needed money
  before OPW application deadline. But I'm 100% sure that given few months
  we can raise the needed money. Hence, I do not see this as a blocker to
  go forward (as long as people believe in my prevision). Would you
  consider this acceptable?
 
 Hi Stefano and Sune,
 
 I think that projects such as the OPW are best suited for fundraising and I
 would personally be keen on donating money.  Also, I think that it would be
 fair to use Debian's money for the first round of OPW if the admins are
 committed to use fundraising for the next rounds.
 
 This said, if the GSoC admins would like to redirect the money they bring in
 Debian to the OPW I think that it would be fair to accept (do-o-cracy...).

Purely my own opinion, not the view of the GSoC admins (or rather, not
*verified* as our view), just mine:

Yes. This would be amazing. 

The money each year goes to the *org*. We can spend it as an org, and
really, it's up to the DPL. In years past, it was used to help pay for
DebConf newbies, but I (personally) would rather see an OPW slot.

*personally*

 
 Bonus question: do we have good fundaising-management sofware packaged in
 Debian ?  That could be an interesting project for the OPW ;)

Indeed!

 
 Cheers,
 
 -- 
 Charles Plessy
 Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
 
 
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Re: Tiny note about bits.debian.org

[Paul Tagliamonte]

CC'ing publicity and ana, since she did the technical work from what I
understand

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 4:40 AM, Boris Pek tehnic...@yandex.ru wrote:
 Hi everyone,

 I am not sure that this is the correct place for my message, but I found
 nothing more relevant. Feel free to redirect me if necessary.

 Recently I found web site http://bits.debian.org/ which intends to be an
 official Debian blog. It is quite beautiful and well designed site. But
 one little thing can be improved as I think. Currently all pages have
 title Bits from Debian and this is a bit inconvenient when you open
 multiple tabs. It would be better to use an article title there.

You can prepare a patch for review against debbits @
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debbits/debbits.git;a=summary --
the theme bits you want are in
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debbits/debbits.git;a=blob;f=theme-bits/templates/base.html;hb=HEAD
if I grok my jinja2.

Perhaps send that in for review by ana?

Cheers,
  T


 Best wishes,
 Boris

 --
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linux-libre - are we collaborating with them?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

[CC'ing kxra, who isn't subscribed, please keep kxra on CC]


Heyya,

Anyone play with the linux-libre[1] project? Does the kernel team know
about this stuff? It seems like we're trying for the same sort of thing
(100% free software kernel)

Cheers,
  T


[1]: http://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

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Re: upload processing resumed

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Michael Gilbert mgilb...@debian.orgwrote:

 On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 3:32 AM, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
  On 13054 March 1977, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
  Is dak is present in a “released” state somewhere? Do other people use
  those releases? Meaning, should we ask for a CVE for this?
 
  No, no and no.
 
  We have git. We have people use that, thats for sure. Checked out at
  various dates. I don't think thats something a CVE should be issued
  for. Though I won't block it if someone does, but the only thing you can
  do is anything before commit XY, update with the latest.

 CVE is an awareness thing, helping people become aware of the
 vulnerabilities they may have.  The above wording would be a fine line
 in terms of defining what is vulnerable.

  I really hope (and we silently somehow assume) that those who use dak
  are following at least debian-...@lists.debian.org.

 I really don't think anything like that can be assumed.  My guess is
 that a larger percentage of clones have had no reason to subscribe to
 the ml, and thus won't know about the problems in their versions.

 Overall, it's better to be as transparent as possible to diffuse
 knowledge further.

 Best wishes,
 Mike


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It's my understanding that this is a result of a debianqueued bug, not dak
it's self.

It's unlikely other people are using it, IMHO

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: [Debconf-discuss] Anonymous donation to Debconf 13

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 06:21:56PM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
 Russ Allbery writes (Re: [Debconf-discuss] Anonymous donation to Debconf 
 13):
  The part that I'm missing here is what you felt should have been done
  differently.
 
 This is a reasonable question.
 
  Let's assume that Debian has no control over the offering of the donation
  (or loan) in the first place.  I think that's a reasonable assumption.
  What I would then expect is for the team to discuss the offer (since no
  decision is ever going to be made out of hand), and then reject the offer
  as being insufficiently transparent and posing other problems with
  oversight and possible undue influence.
 
 Indeed.
 
  That seems to be exactly what happened.
 
 No.  My reading of Moray's message is that some members of the Debconf
 teams used the existence of the donation as an argument in favour of
 selecting Le Camp as the site.
 
  I'm not seeing any evidence on this thread (and, indeed, directly
  contrary assertions from people I think we all have reason to trust) that
  the withdrawn offer had any material effect on the choice of venue.
 
 Moray writes:
 
 Certainly at the time many people within the DebConf team were
 uncomfortable that this anonymous donation was used to argue
 that we didn't need to worry about the high prices at Le Camp, and
 to argue that we should definitely choose Le Camp since this money
 was only available if we went there.
 
 I read Moray's used to argue as referring to arguments from people
 within Debian or Debconf.  Obviously it would be entirely
 inappropriate for anyone within Debian or Debconf's decisionmaking
 structures to argue that we should make a particular decision because
 an anonymous donor makes it a condition that we do so.
 
 In
   http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20121029.132401.59bef7b6.en.html
 Holger uses the 46k secured for Le Camp as an argument in favour of
 Le Camp as a venue.  This can surely only refer to conditional
 donations and AIUI this includes the anonymous donation.

Look, I'm super into this stuff (really), so much so that my day job is
in government transparency. I care a lot about money's role in politics,
and this isn't too different.

Let's stop this thread, this horse is very (VERY) dead.

I feel like I'm reading a really tragic version of ancient aliens, with
all these conjectures and question marks.

Let's set up guidelines on what sort of donations we should accept and
be done with it. Personally, I think anything over 250 USD should never
be anonymous. We can bikeshead that mess later.

Let's lay off and let the team in charge do their job. No rules were
broken this time.

 
 Ian.
 
 
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Seriously, /thread, please.

Cheers,
  Paul

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Re: [Debconf-discuss] Anonymous donation to Debconf 13

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sat, Dec 01, 2012 at 02:47:13PM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
 On 01/12/12 01:32, Holger Levsen wrote:
  Hi,
 
  On Freitag, 30. November 2012, David Prévot wrote:
 
  I fail to understand, if you really “don't want to be spreading
  unverified rumours”, why are you posting this kind of questions to two
  other wider mailing lists?
 
  [...]
 
  http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20121102.150947.08f4206c.en.html
 
  it's a dead horse. old, long dead.
 

 No, it's not

Regardless of it's current age or health, can y'all please do the horse
beating elsewhere?


 I made two trips to evaluate an alternative venue

 Feeling threatened by this competition, rather than working harder to
 get a good deal, proponents of the original venue suddenly secured 40k
 CHF of anonymous sponsorship, but with various strings attached,
 including a condition that the original venue was used

 Consequently, the other merits of the venues were not heavily discussed
 and one of the DebConf chairs (yourself) suddenly started publicly
 endorsing Le Camp with the original super-size budget

 The fact that the 40k promise was taken away again a few days after your
 epiphany doesn't change the fact that it was on the table while you were
 in Switzerland doing the venue evaluation.

 With this new found enthusiasm for Le Camp, much more time was then
 wasted taking a fresh look at the Le Camp budget, valuable time that
 could have been spent negotiating a better deal or looking at other
 venues.  In the end, when the figures didn't add up, DebCamp had to be
 abolished, and many people now feel that is a bad thing for Debian overall.

 Whether it was sponsorship or a loan or something else doesn't really
 matter either: your communications from 28 October indicated that this
 money was a key factor in your decision to endorse Le Camp.



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Re: mjg59's blog on planet.d.o

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 01:38:03PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
 Moray Allan mo...@sermisy.org writes:
 
  So I would suggest instead that material unrelated to Debian, but from
  people within the broad community, is actually by far the best use for
  Planet Debian, and that the more relevant posts are to Debian, the less
  appropriate they are for Planet.
 
 Would people like me to push my entire blog to Planet Debian, including
 all my book reviews and software release announcements?
 
 Serious question.  I currently maintain a separate debian tag that only
 gets posts that feel relevant to Debian because I was worried about
 dumping too much content into Planet Debian, but I can undo that and give
 Planet Debian a full feed if people would really prefer.

I'd much prefer that, Russ.

It's nice to know people in a more personal way. We're also a community,
and the planet feed is a stream of the Debian community's lives. Reading
a blog feed of stuff I already read on mailing lists is lame :)

 
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Re: mjg59's blog on planet.d.o

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 12:19:12AM +0100, Jakub Wilk wrote:
 AFAIK Matthew Garrett hasn't been active and directly involved
 participant in the Debian development community for years. What is
 the reason for keeping his blog on planet.d.o?

What's the problem? I enjoy it, and most of the posts effect Debian in
some way.

I'm sure there are worse blogs to pick on

Cheers,
  Paul


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Re: ditching the official use logo?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

I was hoping someone else would chime in (I hate dominating discussions
on MLs, so someone, please cut me off)


On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 04:21:07PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
 Thanks to all participants on this thread thus far.
 
 On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 12:05:46PM +0200, Luca Capello wrote:
  On Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:52:18 +0200, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
   or other official documentes should carry the official logo, so
   their reproduction and modification is not legal.
  I completely agree with such a point.
 
 All in all, we seem to have people on both camps of keep it and ditch
 it, ... as it often happens :-)
 
 The arguments in favor of keeping it seem reasonable in the abstract
 but, frankly, all a tad too theoretical. As a matter of fact we do not
 use the restricted logo that much (if at all) in official documents: as
 DPL I've signed quite a few of them (letters, certificates, some
 contracts, etc.) and I've never used the restricted logo. I also don't

I mean, sure. This is something we can change, if we decide to do so.
It's also true this is not currently an active concern.

 see us doing that anytime soon, because we love free content and we're
 naturally *not* inclined to use non-free stuff. Also, there is a
 communication backlash if we start using the restricted logo in such
 places now, because it is not known, and people will wonder hey, this
 is not the Debian log, what's going on?.

It's got the swirl in it, I think people will figure it out, if we did
start adopting it on works (yadda yadda, more of what was said before)

 
 But let's assume for the sake of the argument we want to keep both
 logos. (Maybe nowadays we're not yet convinced it's pointless to keep
 the restricted one, but maybe we'll be in a few years from now if our
 pattern of usage for it won't change *g*.)
 
 How about the attached patch?

Looks great to me. Calling it restricted is technically correct, and
well, that's the the best kind of correct.

 
 In hindsight, it doesn't change the logos, but just improve our
 communications about them. It clarifies that our preferred logo is the
 open use one, and call the other for what it is, a restricted logo for
 basically internal use only. It also explicitly encourages people to use
 the open use logo, when referring to Debian.
 
 Would such a patch constitute an acceptable compromise?

I'm very much happy with the suggested changes. Others?

 
 Thanks in advance for your comments,
 Cheers.
 -- 
 Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
 Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
 Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
 « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

 Index: index.wml
 ===
 RCS file: /cvs/webwml/webwml/english/logos/index.wml,v
 retrieving revision 1.65
 diff -u -r1.65 index.wml
 --- index.wml 30 Sep 2012 13:51:14 -  1.65
 +++ index.wml 13 Oct 2012 14:11:52 -
 @@ -1,14 +1,12 @@
  #use wml::debian::template title=Debian logos BARETITLE=true
  #include $(ENGLISHDIR)/logos/index.data
  
 -pAlthough Debian can be obtained for free and will always remain
 -that way, events such as the problem with the ownership of the
 -term ldquo;Linuxrdquo; have shown that Debian needs to protect its
 -property from any use which could hurt its reputation./p
 -
 -pDebian has decided to create two logos: a href=#official-useone
 -logo/a is for official Debian use; the a href=#open-useother
 -logo/a falls under an open use type license./p
 +pDebian has two logos. The a href=#open-useofficial logo/a (also 
 known
 +  as open use logo) contains the well-known Debian qswirl/q and best
 +  represents the visual identity of the Debian Project. A separate, a
 +  href=#restricted-userestricted-use logo/a, also exists for use by the
 +  Debian Project and its members only. To refer to Debian, please prefer the
 +  open use logo./p
  
  hr
  
 @@ -51,11 +49,11 @@
  col width=35% /
  /colgroup
  tr
 -th colspan=2a name=official-useDebian Official Use Logo/a/th
 +th colspan=2a name=restricted-useDebian Restricted Use Logo/a/th
  /tr
  tr
  td
 -h3Debian Official Use Logo License/h3
 +h3Debian Restricted Use Logo License/h3
  
  pCopyright (c) 1999 Software in the Public Interest/p
  ol
 @@ -74,7 +72,7 @@
   liWe reserve the right to revoke a license for a product/li
  /ol
  
 -pPermission has been given to use the official logo on clothing (shirts,
 +pPermission has been given to use the restricted logo on clothing (shirts,
  hats, etc) as long as they are made by a Debian developer and not sold for
  profit./p
  /td




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Re: ditching the official use logo?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 10:55:56PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
 Le Tue, Oct 02, 2012 at 09:04:12AM -0400, David Prévot a écrit :
  Le 01/10/2012 06:40, Bart Martens a écrit :
   On Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 12:27:37PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
   Note for those who have never looked into this: the official use logo
   is the one with the bottle.
   
   My personal take on it is that we should simply
   ditch it, focusing on a single logo (the open use one) with a
   DFSG-free license, that we do now have.
   
   I don't object against ditching the logo with the bottle.  I don't object
   against keeping it around either.  Maybe if people want to keep it around 
   for
   nostalgic reasons it can be kept available on the website as the former
   official logo with a nice story about its history or so.
  
  The www.d.o website use to keep online “archive” content, so I guess it
  would be fine, but I'm not thrilled by the idea to keep non-free content
  online inside our official website, maybe other people will have more
  comments. About the “nice story about its history”, proposals will be
  welcome ;).
 
 Hello everybody,
 
 I think it would be good to discontinue the Debian Official Use Logo if we
 agree that it is causing more problems than it solves.  To avoid keeping
 non-free material in the current website, maybe it can point instead to the 
 CVS
 archive?  Then the official logo can be mentionned very briefly, for instance.


So, I'm going to try to be the lone voice of dissent here.

I think the very non-free logo serves to solve a very careful problem,
which is to allow for officiating exernal things.

Right now, the way I understand it is that you can, in a DFSG and legal
way, create a document with the Debian logo  brand, and create a
certificate that looks to be from Debian, and sell them as some sort
of certification from Debian without recourse from the Debian project.

I know this is a borderline slimy argument, and I really (REALLY) don't
like being on the side of non-free, but I think continuing to assert
copyright / non-free conditions on the official use logo won't really
cause much more harm.

It's not like it's in the archive (correct me if I'm wrong, and if so,
we should fix that), or commonly violated anyways (whereas the old
logo was)

Stuff like DD certificiates (I think they already have this, but I've
not seen one for a long long times), or other official documentes
should carry the official logo, so their reproduction and modification
is not legal.

 
   Debian used to have an official use logo (see 
 http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/logos/officiallogo-50.jpg
   for example), but does not recommend it anymore as its license is not free.
 
 Cheers,
 
 -- 
 Charles Plessy
 Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
 
 
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Re: ditching the official use logo?

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 08:48:40PM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
 On Mon, October 8, 2012 16:52, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
  Right now, the way I understand it is that you can, in a DFSG and legal
  way, create a document with the Debian logo  brand, and create a
  certificate that looks to be from Debian, and sell them as some sort
  of certification from Debian without recourse from the Debian project.
 
 This is possible whether the official use logo exists or not: right now
 anyone can create a certificate with the open use logo, which is what
 everyone and their dog recognises as the Debian logo.

Sure, but the issue is it's legal with the open-use logo and not legal
with the bottle logo, which means we have legal recourse when we use the
nonfree logo.

 
 The current open use licence does not allow you to misrepresent yourself
 as being Debian. The Cc license summary even mentions prominently that it
 you may not use it to claim endorsement by Debian:
 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
 
 I find it therefore doubtful that keeping the bottle logo solves any real
 world problem.
 
 
 Cheers,
 Thijs
 
 
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Re: New Debian kilts

[Paul Tagliamonte]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 04:53:47PM +0100, Wolodja Wentland wrote:
 On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 18:29 +0200, Olivier Berger wrote:
  Wolodja Wentland deb...@babilen5.org writes:
   I am considering to organise a group purchase of Debian kilts and wanted 
   to
   ask if other people are interested in one. You can find information about 
   the
   kilts on [0] and I spoke to the tailor/weaver [1] today who is happy to
   produce yet another round.
  
  Do you have an estimate of the cost ?
 
 Well, not exactly as it depends on how many people are ordering. As detailed
 on [0] they charge a setup fee if you want them to weave a tartan that is
 not in stock. The wiki lists setup costs of £300, but I am not sure how
 accurate that is. Their prices for kilts made from standard (i.e. in-stock)
 tartan are listed on [1] and I would assume that they can make a reasonable
 offer for kilts made from Debian tartan. It looks as if Hands.com paid for the
 weaving, design and registration of the tartan the last time.
 
 Unfortunately they didn't produce enough cloth and we would therefore have to
 pay for the weaving as well. I went to their store and asked and they quoted
 additional costs of £700 for a *single* made-to-order kilt. To be honest I am
 not entirely sure how much its going to be and I wanted to check if other
 people are interested.
 
 In short: The more we are the better ;)

So, I'd be unlikely to wear a kilt (well, ok, not seriosuly or enough to
buy a nice one), but I would be extremely likely to wear a scarf.

Do we get the material (or scraps or something)? I'd be super interested
in ordering some material to make a scarf or something, if it'd help
bring down the cost a bit.

 
 [0] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf7/Tartan#Future_Orders
 [1] http://www.geoffreykilts.co.uk/gentskilts.html
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