About the calculus for the project [LWN.net]

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 3, 2012 11:50 UTC (Fri) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)
In reply to: About the calculus for the project by tbird20d
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

"Imagine if you were mayor of a town of 300,000 people, and you had to pay a million dollar fine if someone was caught stealing. You have implemented a set of policies to prevent stealing, and to encourage people not to steal. Could you guarantee that no one ever stole? As mayor, would you pay $1,000 for an insurance policy against the fine? That's similar to the cost/benefit calculus for this project, for large enterprises. It's not that executives are unwilling to enforce compliance, or are actively undermining the license of the code their company ships. They just want to reduce risk."

This makes perfect sense to me (ignoring the scale of the numbers). But the analogy is slightly incomplete. In fact there is only one shopkeeper who is making complaints about the theft, and who is causing you to pay those fines. And your insurance policy only covers that one shopkeeper.

There are plenty of other shopkeepers who have been stolen from. And so far, the stuff that's been stolen from them has been returned after that one guy has gone to the police and the thieves have been caught.

So yes, you can silence that one guy, but you are taking a gamble that none of the others will start to stand up for themselves, now that he's gone.

There are all kinds of other discussions going on in this thread, about how the mayor is evil for "encouraging" stealing, which I don't believe. And how the one shopkeeper is evil for demanding that the thieves return all the stuff they stole, rather than only the stuff they stole from him.

All of those other discussions miss the point, as far as I'm concerned. The point is that this "insurance", which shuts up the one guy who's been calling the police and getting stuff returned for all his friends, is not going to work.

Someone else is just going to call the police instead. It's a PITA for them and it distracts them from the shopkeeping that they prefer to do — but if their friend can't do it any more, they'll just have to do it themselves.

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About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 3, 2012 12:39 UTC (Fri) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]

"Someone else is just going to call the police instead. It's a PITA for them and it distracts them from the shopkeeping that they prefer to do — but if their friend can't do it any more, they'll just have to do it themselves.

Of course, the mayor might realise this; he's not silly. So he might deliberately set about trying to discourage the other shopkeepers from calling the police.

He might tell tales of police brutality, but be strangely unable to provide actual evidence of this.

He might encourage those people who complain about the police returning stolen goods to everyone, rather than just the one shopkeeper who reported the theft. And try to expand that complaint into something more sinister about the police being "overzealous", but again without any real evidence.

And he might find any other method he can to discredit the police with unfounded claims.

Hopefully, the other shopkeepers would have the wit to see through that deception.

I believe that Bradley Kuhn is telling the truth when he reports what the SFC actually ask for; I find it hard to believe any of the wild claims I've heard, and I trust that their behaviour will be continue to reasonable.

But to a certain extent that doesn't even matter. I don't have to trust that the SFC will always behave reasonably for ever and ever — because if they ever did violate my trust, I'd just withdraw my permission for them to act on my behalf.

I strongly recommend that every kernel developer should work with the SFC and allow them to take enforcement action on our behalf. You don't have to sign in blood. If any of these unfounded claims ever did turn out to be true, you could easily withdraw your permission. It's that simple.