----- Original Message ----- > From: "Lars Seipel" <lars.seipel@xxxxxxxxx> > To: "Christian Schaller" <cschalle@xxxxxxxxxx> > Cc: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" <desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Sent: Wednesday, September 7, 2016 4:50:30 PM > Subject: Re: Procedure for dealing with 3rd party applications > > On Tue, Sep 06, 2016 at 04:10:14PM -0400, Christian Schaller wrote: > > So one thing I been thinking quite a bit about here is that for many > > developers whose application could potentially be included might > > want to be able to have a non-public discussion with us on it first. There > > could be many reasons for this including not wanting to create > > a public expectation of something before they finally decided upon doing it > > to needing to figure out some technical or legal details before committing > > I really dislike the confidential part and the reasons given for it > aren't very convincing. Why do you think this is necessary to achieve > the purpose of the 3rd party software policy as set out by the council? > > If there's a need to work out legal details in a non-public manner, then > confidentiality should be restricted to those legal discussions only. > > Why should the fact that the Workstation WG reached out to vendor X (and > the accompanying rationale for it) be kept a secret? > > I have a hard time seeing any additional secrecy in this process as > working towards advancing Fedora's mission. So if it is required at all > in specific instances (like possibly with legal), I'd like those to be > well-justified. Public communication should be the obvious default. > > This is still Fedora after all. Ok, good question. And my answer is that this is a sensitive issue for both sides and we don't necessarily want to scare someone away or alienate them in the name of marginal extra openness. Having a public negative discussion of a person or company is probably the worst thing we could do to ourselves here, because no matter how justified that might be in a given case it is very likely to scare away anyone else from even wanting to talk with us. Nobody wants their name dragged through the mud. This of course means that the working group members are in practice only going to reach out to people or companies that we expect to be approved without much disagreement. Another point worth making here is that the amount of applications where this would be relevant is quite limited. Just make yourself a quick mental list of potential people or companies and it is doubtful you even reach 10. Longer term there might be more as we look at offering more flatpaks, but for the near term future there is a very limited number of apps I think we can even imagine looking at. It could also be potentially bad PR for us, because as soon as we announce names people start building expectations, like AppX will be available for download in Fedora. If we have a lot of those not coming through for reasons ranging from vendor disinterest to technical issues to legal issues it generates negative noise around the project. So what I am saying is that we are probably better of only making this a formal issue once there is a formal issue to be had, meaning that if I for instance reach out to a vendor and they say thanks but no thanks then it is just as good that that never becomes an official Fedora question at all. It is also worth noting that the 3rd party policy we want is objective in the sense that the criteria for inclusion is pretty clear. So the discussions we will have is if a proposed application qualifies the criteria, not subjective matters like 'Company X are shitheads' or 'an IDE for Pascal is a waste of time'. Which means that there is nothing being kept secret for any sinister reasons simply because nobody would even bother pursuing this if they are not convinced the application in question passes those objective criteria as opposed to a political process. Christian -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
