Ubuntu and governance

Posted Oct 11, 2007 5:01 UTC (Thu) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

mjg59 wrote:

Google has little difficulty in finding a link to the IRC logs

Irrelevant to the point as stated.

Which isn't the case at all.

But it is. Once again, your denial ignores the substance of what I said, and professes to refute some assertion I did not, in fact, make. You can, if you wish, read what I actually wrote -- or you're perfectly welcome to continue to ignore it. Fine with me, either way.

You were wrong about the lack of IRC logs

Excuse me, but here I am having an increasingly difficult time extending the spirit of charity, and continuing to assume you are merely having reading-comprehension problems, rather than deliberately misstating. I nowhere claimed IRC logs didn't exist at all. What I said -- and you have had ample opportunity to see it in plain ASCII -- is that "The IRC sessions are not logged and made available in the general case." The meaning was perfectly clear: People would not find them in any of the expected place, nor if they found them would have any reasonable assurance of them being accurate and complete. If by some rather improbable chance the point wasn't obvious from my initial post, it certainly should have been in the detailed followup that spelled it out explicitly.

In any event, the hyperlink you've now supplied to http://people.ubuntu.com/~fabbione/irclogs/ (for which, thanks, by the way) purports to cover meetings of the Technical Board -- but the ones that would be relevant to member-conduct discipline would be those of the Community Council. So, your wiki edit to http://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/processes/techboard, though appreciated, is mostly irrelevant to the preceding discussion.

(By the way, as a point of interest, which files inside your irclogs directory are those of the Technical Committee? Looking for, e.g., the string "tech" turned up nothing.)

the forums where decisions actually end up getting made

Nothing you said has claimed that decisions don't get made based on those discussions -- and, frankly, it would be very strange for them not to. Why else have private and confidential discussions, other than to help reach conclusions on delicate matters?

the lack of transparency

To the contrary, I showed that lack of transparency; you have merely talked around it. (Again, the gesture concerning Technical Committee IRC logs -- which I assume must be somewhere in there, is an appreciated exception, but came after my post, which, I hope you realise, illustrates the point.)

the lack of a reliable record

The precise wording was "Anyone trying to find a reliable record of what they've done and why will be stymied by the surrounding information void." You seem to have conceded this point, in allowing that, yes, there was nowhere on the Technical Committee pages, let alone the much more relevant Community Council ones, that lets one find relevant records -- and that, actually, there are no such records within those groups' pages at all.

I don't consider this worth harping on, merely worth noting once and moving on. I would appreciate doing that now, and not be obliged to restate that simple point yet again, just because you don't get it.

Google gives a fairly good overview,

A more prosaic and less convoluted reply might have been "Oh, good point. I'm Matthew Garrett, member of the Ubuntu Technical Board and Ubuntu Kernel Team" [and whatever else might be relevant]. Your world timeline may differ, but in mine, LWN nicks just aren't really useful (in the general case) as identifiers of one's person and affiliations.

Personally, I'd tend to interpret a claim that a process lacks honesty as a criticism of said process - accusations of dishonesty are a fairly common source of libel suits.

Are you actually threatening me with a libel lawsuit, Mr. Matthew J. Garrett? If you wish to confirm that, I will be glad to provide you with contact information for my attorney, for service of process -- but our conversation will necessarily conclude at that point. Before you do, however, I'll point out -- once again -- what I actually said.

Quoting: "Now, it's entirely possible if not likely that the end-results are mostly desirable, e.g., incorrigible personal flamers and posters of large amounts of offtopic drivel being exiled temporarily or permanently. However, the process is not (per above) particularly honest. Me, I prefer honest."

I did not impute personal dishonesty to you, or to Mark Shuttleworth, or to Canonical, Ltd. I said it appeared to me that the process was dishonest, e.g., in asserting that project governance is run by straightforward application of the Code(s) of Conduct, when self-evidently that cannot be the case, because those two Codes are nothing at all like functional governance documents.

For what it's worth, I am glad to say that I very much doubt you're in any way dishonest -- a hothead who doesn't bother to read attentively, absolutely, and who really should edit his posts a lot more carefully before sounding off in public, but I have no reason whatsoever to cast aspersions on your honesty.

If and when you speak to your own attorney, by the way, please make sure to ask him whether a "process" (of, e.g., a Linux community project) has standing to bring libel litigation in court. The question will absolutely make his day.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com