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How private is debian-private?How private is debian-private?Posted Dec 8, 2005 19:19 UTC (Thu) by thompsot (guest, #12368)Parent article: How private is debian-private?
If they posted under the understanding that it is a private list, then all their posts live in a private list. If there is a desire to open it up for the public to read, then an announcement of the change in policy should be given and anything posted after that will be open, but the old lists are still private. These particular archives would not even exist except for the fact that they were set up as a non-public exchange.
I think it's fine to stop the "understanding" or "agreement" and start a new list with new rules, but the old list should retain it's current properties because some people may have posted certain ideas or information to it based on it's current properties.
This is not a national government or tightly regulated entity where there is already an understanding that decades later information will be opened, it's a developers list for free software. I don't see any reason to blow up the trust of the people who entered one agreement/understanding and are suddenly told the agreement/understanding is proactively null and void.
'Let your "yes" be yes and your "no" be no'
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How private is debian-private? Posted Dec 9, 2005 3:52 UTC (Fri) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] debian-private is a horrible name. The list isn't really private, or secure, or anything. It's just only available to a subset of Debian developers (the subset that has @debian.org email). There are what, like 3000 of us now? And anyone can apply, so you have no guarantees about who will read it.
debian-private isn't for super-secret information. It's for information the project doesn't want to be public. Almost all of that is time-sensitive, "I'll be at location X on day Y, anyone want to hang out?" or "Here's a sample press release, any comments before we send it?"
On the other hand, it contains a wealth of useful information, because all the discussion about the formation of the Social Contract and DFSG happened there -- because there wasn't yet an SC to say we should be discussing things in public. That kind of stuff should be public! It's important to free software history, and to aid people in interpreting the SC and DFSG now.
The "now anyone can read it!" argument is bogus. Anyone could read it before, if they took the time to become a DD. And when you become one, you don't have to sign an NDA. It's just an informal "don't pass this stuff around, okay?"
Heck, half the posts on -private lately have been "Why is this discussion on -private? Move it to -foo." (Oh no, did I just leak something private?)
How private is debian-private? Posted Dec 9, 2005 14:53 UTC (Fri) by thompsot (guest, #12368) [Link] If it is truly all strictly time-sensitive in nature and anyone could read it anyway, then an expiration on the "non-public" part would work. If there is truly "private" information sprinkled around in there though, possibly due to "over trust", then at least that information needs to be trimmed out I think. I thought there was an "official" understanding that this list would be private so I took my cues from that and from reading the article and only a few links from it. Not being a Debian developer (but an avid Debian user), I have never looked at the list. Thanks for clearing that up.
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