2010/7/23 Máirín Duffy <duffy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > If I need a cake for a party, and my mom is a baker, is it really cool > to put her work on equal footing with other bakers in the area? When, > you know, I wouldn't be alive without her? And she'll bake my cake for > free? If you are putting forward a state of publicly documented requirements that you expect vendors to meet generally...on behalf of an organization that you represent...yes...it would be inappropriate to not hold your mom to the same minimum standard of performance. Fedora isn't your party. It's not my party. It's something bigger. I may trust Red Hat like a valued family member, but that means I trust them to meet and exceed standards of performance... not lower my standards for them. > > I think impartiality here is a myth. Red Hat is part of Fedora's family. > I feel that if you try to encode equality between Red Hat and some > random vendor into policy, you're going to fail so why bother? In not asking for equality or impartiality. I'm saying that the policy on external deps should be looked at as a minimum standard of performance. If we can't reasonably expect Red Hat to meet that minimum standard of performance, we certainly can't realistically expect others to either. It would be hypocritical of us when in reality we feel Red Hat is a leader in openness. If Red Hat can't meet the strictures of any minimum requirements in policy we put forward about web services.. then clearly the policy is unworkable in practise for any other vendor on the planet. > >> We can still have meta arguments and make judgement >> calls about choosing particular vendors based on track record. I >> certainly don't intend to take intrastructure's or the board's power >> to say we trust vendor X over vendor Y because a track record of >> performance or unquantifiable on a case by case basis. >> >> But in the scope of this discussion about crafting policy we need to >> treat all vendors..neutrally to be credible. Red Hat can't be thought >> of as exceptional in the lens of policy on external service providers. > > Why not? > > I think any service provider that is part of Fedora's family and > supports Fedora should be considered over other vendors. E.g., we have > various hosting sponsors for our website that we have rotating banner > ads for. Certainly I'd like to see us supporting those businesses over > say Google. In the light of the discussion at hand. Are those hosting providers all using open stacks all the way down to bare metal? Or are we going to make exceptions for them as well because they are already a part of our family of sponsors? I'm not saying there aren't other factors involved in choosing a vendor for services. I'm saying that not holding vendors we trust to the publicly stated minimum standard of performance is a dubious practise for any governance model. If anything you craft your standard of performance such that only your trusted vendors can meet and exceed them. Not in a way that requires you to treat your trusted vendors as exceptions to the rule for the sole purpose of excluding vendors your don't like. And I'm not discounting your personal hangups with Google. What i am saying is, don't try gerrymander our web services policy that is meant to discriminate against Google and then explicitly have to treat other vendors as exceptions. The rule should be a firm minimum standard for everyone. And then you lay case-by-case judgement calls over that. > >> If anything we have to continually hold Red Hat to a more exacting >> standard as a hedge against bias with the knowledge and the trust that >> Red Hat is committed to meeting the standard of performance this >> project puts forward. > > Why? Because its the ethical way to move forward and to encourage more openness across the ecosystem of web services. If we can't hold Red Hat to our minimum standards on vendor performance, then who could we hold to our minimum standard? Because we trust Red Hat to be the better example, we use them as the measuring stick to hold others against. -jef _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
