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[Máirín Duffy]

Hi Toshio,

On Sun, 2010-07-25 at 06:42 -0400, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > If a policy is needed I think it should be board signoff on infrastructure team
> > calls involving third party services case-by-case.
> > 
> As I said to Paul, the answer here is no.  The Board has no business
> deciding on the case-by-case issues that arise here, that's purely an
> infrastructure call.  I can't think of a perfect analogy within the design
> team but here's two imperfect analogies:
> 
> In terms of who is knowledgable to make the call, it's like having the Board
> decide that the design team must use inkscape to produce all the
> hackergotchis.  The knowledge of the costs and benefits of inkscape vs
> other programs and the suitability to a particular task does not reside in
> the Board, it resides in the design team and therefore it should be the
> design team who makes that call.
> 
> Workwise, it's like having the design team decide that they want
> a certain theme for all hackergotchi but having the Board review the
> hackergotchi produced by the design team and send back one's that the Board
> decides doesn't fit into that theme.

The board definitely doesn't have any business deciding case-by-case
what decisions the infrastructure team (or the design team) makes. 

Your design team example on hackergotchi is good in that the board
doesn't have any business in saying what particular app our designers
must use. At the same time, I think it -would- be reasonable to say the
design team should use open formats, or at least formats readable with
Fedora itself. It would be a problem if the design team decided that we
should use Adobe Flash animations for the www.fedoraproject.org front
page banner, and that UI mockups made with Microsoft Silverlight are
acceptable. (What use is a banner on the front page of Fedora's website
if people using Fedora can't view it? What use is a silverlight mockup
if the developers who need to use it can't interact with it?) It's for
similar reasons that the fonts we use in the collateral we produce are
open source and packaged in Fedora, and why we're looking at switching
the secondary font now (some of the languages Fedora community members
speak are not well-supported by Modata). 

While I don't think it's the case of any of the designers currently on
the team, there are designers out there who don't (yet) share the same
values as the project who might think they are doing a good thing in
pushing for some closed tech to solve a problem and do so without even
realizing the implications because they're new to the project or just
aren't acclimated to its values yet (which I think are nowhere near as
known in the design world as they are in the software development
world.)

So I was more thinking it would be reasonable in the case where a policy
is written to protect our values [1] and either a proposal or an
implementation is thought to violate it, that an exception should be
approved or denied by the board since they are meant to make decisions
that involve Fedora's values. Maybe it's a silly point and doesn't make
sense but I thought I would explain my line-of-thinking a bit better.

~m

[1] (e.g. the originally-referenced policy which I believe stated we
can't use non-free software services)