Re: Software Administration Guide and "forbidden content"

[Pete Travis]

On 01/26/2014 01:36 PM, Christopher Antila wrote:
>  On 23 January 2014 11:18:01 Pete Travis wrote:
>  > Hi Guillermo,
>
>  > I came home last night and was met with a request on IRC from nb to
>  remove
>  > content referencing rpmfusion from the F14 Software Administration and
>  > Musicians Guide. He was tasked to this by spot/Fedora Legal via IRC as
>  > well, probably precipitated by the discussion on advisory-board@ .
>
>  > I thought a bit about the legal implications and the potential publicity
>  > fallout of an engaged debate over our content, and in a knee-jerk
>  reaction,
>  > removed references to rpmfusion from web.git. Nick had prepped a
>  patch for
>  > the Musicians Guide that I merged forward. The Storage
>  Administration Guide
>  > clearly needed more work, and I unpublished it from F14 forward for now.
>
>  > So, I would like your thoughts on how to move forward. I can
>  probably apply
>  > some regex to substitute nonfunctional example repos, but my Spanish is
>  > laughable at best.  I would like to work with you to resolve the
>  immediate
>  > issue as best as we can.  The same goes for the Musicians Guide.
>
>  > The greater question and its handling is a little distasteful,
>  though.  I
>  > dislike the communication through back channels and PMs, there has been
>  > nothing like a policy declaration from Fedora Legal, and I'm continuing
>  > that by changing content and mailing privately myself.  As much as I
>  > believe in open communication,  I really don't want to see some tech
>  > journalist or blogger pushing vitriolic headlines [...].  It seems
>  better
>  > to deal with the immediate issue quickly and quietly, then have an open
>  > discussion on general policy once that work is done.
>
>  > Again, I apologize for yanking your work off docs.fp.o .  I do want
>  to make
>  > it right.
>
>  > --Pete
>
>  I feel this has been more than *a little* distasteful. There are so
>  many small
>  things that could have been done differently to make this event more
>  palatable.
>  At minimum, the authors of affected guides could have been notified
>  just before
>  changes were made. A little better, the docs@ list should have been
>  notified.
>  Better still, we could have been given some length of time to remove the
>  content ourselves.
>
>  As it is, at least in the Musicians' Guide, you didn't do a very good
>  job (or
>  "spot missed a spot"). The chapter called "Planet CCRMA at Home" is
>  about a
>  third-party repository. The Qtractor chapter still refers to
>  RPMFusion, and
>  it's probably not the only one. Furthermore, as I previously
>  mentioned, the
>  Musicians' Guide's "Revision History" was not amended to indicate this
>  certainly notable change in content.
>
>  Plus, I didn't publish the Musicians' Guide with Fedora 17 for a
>  reason: it
>  was out-of-date, and I didn't have the resources to fix that. Now we've
>  published obsolete documentation for end-of-life software, making the
>  web.git
>  repository about 250 MiB larger in the process.
>
>  - From my position, there's not much to debate. If Fedora Legal
>  officially decides
>  (or has already officially decided) we can't refer to third-party
>  repositories
>  from official Fedora documentation, we must remove references to
>  third-party
>  repositories from official Fedora documentation. Until they do, or
>  until someone
>  points to a previous decision, I'm disinclined to make changes that will
>  decrease the usefulness of the Musicians' Guide. A guide about software
>  management would also probably be less useful if references to
>  third-party
>  repositories were removed.
>
>  In more than three years, nobody has said anything about the Fedora 14
>  editions of these documents until now. An extra week, letting the
>  guide owners
>  sort things out, probably wouldn't have killed anyone. Unfortunately,
>  a "knee-
>  jerk reaction" has killed openness and therefore accountability.
>
>  I've thought for a couple of days about how to respond. I accept what's
>  happened and I can understand why it happened. I bear no grudges, and
>  I'm open
>  to making further changes as requested by the Fedora Legal team. I won't,
>  however, engage in a discussion "behind closed doors" unless: (1) the
>  door is
>  clearly labeled, (2) the result of the conversation, along with the
>  decision-
>  making process, is published publicly, and (3) we fear something
>  greater than
>  tech bloggers.
>
>
>  Christopher 
The reaction from you and Eric here is one I will learn from. I do
believe in open communication on these things, from start to finish.  
In the future, we should ( and I will ) insist on bugs filed against
anything with legal complaints. It is obvious in retrospect, and I am
suitably embarrassed. I hope you can forgive my panic  :)

Moving forward, I would of course like to help with the content as
needed.  I won't barge into your Guide and start making changes on my
own, but do feel free to give me homework, create and assign bugs, whatever.

-- 
-- Pete Travis
 - Fedora Docs Project Leader
 - 'randomuser' on freenode
 - immanetize(a)fedoraproject.org