Approving Spins

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 05.12.2012, 15:51 -0600 schrieb Bruno Wolff III:
> On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 16:45:02 -0500,
>    "Eric H. Christensen" <sparks at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
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> >During today's Board meeting we were asked to approve four spins and
> their trademark usage.  I'm not sure why we have to approve the spins
> themselves outside of the trademark usage since we don't individually
> approve other works from other SIGs (documentation, artwork, swag,
> etc).  This seems to be a new rule (within the last couple of years)
> and I'm currently trying to determine exactly when this came about and
> why.
> >
> >That said, I'd like to abolish this rule.  It doesn't make sense to
> selectively approve what one SIG does.
> 
> Note that the Spins SIG is dysfunctional.

It's not dead - it just smells funny. ;)

> Regular meetings ceased a long time ago. 

I don't think we need regular meetings, as long as we manage to get
together when we need to do stuff.  Like now, I will call for a meeting
to approve the spins.

> A few people help out with different aspects of it, but there 
> really isn't a coherent group to make approval decisions. 

Meritocracy at it's best.  As long as the important people are there,
people who own spins and who commit to spin-kickstarts, I think we have
all we need. Of course we can always improve, but we can get our work
done as 

> Christoph (the 
> wrangler) seems to be pretty busy with other stuff, but he might be able to 
> make a sanity check and a recommendation.

Yes, am very busy with my dayjib, but things have cleared up a bit
recently. As I did not run for the board again, I hope I find some more
time to work on the spins again.

When it was brought up to my attention that there were actually spins
waiting for my review, I reviewed and approved them.  In fact I have
been working a lot with the owners of Fedora Jam for the last week,
probably 30 mail going back and forth.  This should probably happened on
though.

On the topic of board approval of spins:  I think we should clearly
define what the board has to do and what not.  I remember times when
board members not only discussed the trademark issues, but also wanted
to have a call on design and even technical stuff.  We have other bodies
for that and now there is a consensus among the board members that we
should just trust these bodies to make the right decision.

This being said I think the board just needs to take care of the
trademark approval and do a general sanity check.  There are two
questions that are important:
     1. Does this harm any other groups within Fedora.  For example,
        would we allow a single contributor to ship an alternative GNOME
        or KDE spin that somehow collides with the work of the desktop
        or KDE SIG?
     2. Will this spin benefit Fedora or does this spin cause any damage
        to the project?  This is mainly about Fedora's perception in the
        public.

I don't think we need strict criteria to answer these questions, a
little bit of common sense should do.  I think that worked fine today,
the only thing it took so long is that we were uncertain what exactly
the role of the board was.

Long story short: Lets keep it simple, lets use common sense. The board
should not interfere with the business of any other group.  Only the
trademark approval is exclusive board business (not really, RH legal
still can overpower us), the rest is trust in our SIGs and a bit of
common sense.

Kind regards,
Christoph