Approving Spins

[Jared K. Smith]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 6:21 PM, Christoph Wickert
<christoph.wickert at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

This corresponds almost exactly with my feelings on the matter as well
-- it should be the responsibility of the Spins SIG to do the heavy
lifting of a review, especially on technical matters.  The Board's
responsibility here should be 95% "approve the trademark usage" and 5%
"would this give Fedora a black eye if it were publicized".

My *only* concern is that it's explicitly clear that someone (I'd
prefer the Spins SIG) actually boots the spin and tries it out before
it gets approved.  I know from lurking about that the Fedora Jam spin,
for example, has had some testing and run into some technical issues
that needed to be ironed out.  With other Spins currently in process,
I could assume that Christoph and/or someone else in the Spins SIG has
tried to boot them and test them out, but I hate to make assumptions.

> 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.

<sarcasm>But it's so hard to legislate common sense!</sarcasm>

Honestly, though -- common sense is *exactly* what we need in
approving spins.  There's probably been more than 20x more effort put
into understanding and reshaping (multiple times) the *policy* than
there actually has been in helping the Spins SIG with the work.  It
reminds me of a sarcastic political saying -- "Why discuss substance
when you can argue over policy?"  If a spin has been approved by the
Spins SIG and the Board does see any obvious reasons the spin would
conflict with other spins or give Fedora a black eye, the approval
process should be very simple.

--
Jared Smith