----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Seipel" <lars.seipel(a)gmail.com>
To: "Christian Schaller" <cschalle(a)redhat.com>
Cc: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop"
<desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
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