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 clearly needed more work, and I unpublished it from F14 forward for now.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 at fedoraproject.org


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 538 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/attachments/20140126/786a7374/attachment.sig>