Fresh from the oven, monthly report of what I've been working
on as DPL during January 2012.
Dear Developers,
here is another monthly report of what happened in DPL-land, this
time for January 2012. There's quite a bit to report about ---
including an insane amount of legal-ish stuff --- so please bear
with me. Or not.
Legal stuff
-
Webmaster heroes have decided to tackle the long standing issues
of copyright and
licensing of the Debian
website. I've accepted to help them out in reaching consensus with
license choice and I'm happy to report that we've managed to pick a
DFSG-free license (BSD-ish) for future contributions. Webmasters
will soon contact contributors to re-license old contributions (or
get rid of them), so hopefully will have a DFSG-free website RSN.
Many thanks go to David Pr vot for successfully tackling such a can
of worms.
-
I've sought a second legal advice on the constraints that
trademarks (might) impose on the work-flow of a distro like Debian.
Luckily, it is coherent with one I've sought in the past so I'm now
in condition to wrap up the "trademark vs DFSG" thread
on -project with the missing legal information. Hopefully, I'll
find time to do that sometime next week.
-
I've restarted discussions
with the Debian France association so that they can become a Debian
Trusted Organization (as per Constitution 9.3). Members of the
board of the association seem to be interested and I'm positive it
could happen fairly soon. The importance of this is that we could
use a back-up association in Europe to hold Debian assets, to
complement the services that FFIS are already offering us.
-
Thanks to the contributions of Benjamin Mako Hill and SPI
lawyers, I've now what I consider a final draft of a trademark
policy for Debian trademarks. Before proposing it to you, I'm
waiting for some feedback from another umbrella organization for
Free Software projects, that is working on a trademark policy for
all their associated projects. As many Free Software projects are
seeking trademark protection these days, I see benefits in having
uniform (and sane!) policies. I hope to be able to gather the
feedback I still miss this week-end at FOSDEM, and let you know
shortly after that. Once this is done, we'll also be able to
(finally!) relicense all kinds of Debian logos under a DFSG-free
license.
On this front, I've also updated http://www.debian.org/trademark
with the information needed to contact us about trademark usage;
hopefully it'll reduce the burden of answering to such
inquiries.
-
With the help of Kenshi Muto, Fumitoshi Ukai, Ishikawa Mutsumi,
Shuzo Hatta, and Yasuhiro Araki we've started the process to move
the Debian trademark in Japan from individuals (who are present or
past members of the Debian JP association) to SPI. That would help
dealing with these matters, as well as ensure that important Debian
assets are held by Debian Trusted Organizations.
-
I remind you that we've an ongoing complaint with the current
registrant of debian.eu, domain that we believe Debian should
legitimately own. Lawyers at SPI has now formally contacted the
current owner and hopefully we'll be able to solve the issue
amicably in the next months.
-
Some of the past legal advice I sought for PPA came handy in a
discussion
on the legal risks of running a service like mentors.debian.net,
hopefully addressing part of the issues in turning that into
mentors.debian.org
-
Patent policy for the Debian archive is now ready as well and I
also have a patch for the website ready to be merged. I'm just
waiting for the final blessing from SPI (lawyers) to go ahead and
publish it.
Most of the above wouldn't have been possible without the
precious help of folks at
SFLC working for SPI and
Debian. Be sure to thank SFLC for what they're doing for us and
many other Free Software projects.
Coordination
Nobody stepped up to coordinate the artwork collection for
Wheezy I've
mentioned last month, so I've tried to do a little bit of that
myself. The -publicity team is now preparing the call for artwork
and hopefully we'll send it out RSN. In case you want to help,
there is still a lot of room for that; just show up on the
debian-desktop mailing list.
Sprints
A Debian Med sprint has happened in January, and Andreas Tille
has provided a nice and detailed
report
about it. Some more sprints are forthcoming this spring, how
about yours?
Money
-
We got from SPI a prepaid and rechargeable credit card that we
can use for expenses or other kind of guarantees. Many thanks to
Michael Schulteiss, SPI treasurer, for his help with that. Using
it, we've redeemed 10k$ of credits offered to us by Amazon, that
(thanks to ongoing work by Lucas Nussbaum) we're going to use to
make our QA rebuilds independent from the underlying computing
infrastructure.
-
Thanks to the help of Luca Capello, we advanced quite a bit on
forming the Debian Event
Box kit that should make it easier to set up Debian booth at
FOSS events. We bought the machine for it (for about ~755 CHF) and
the box to contain it will soon be on its way as well. If you're at
FOSDEM, tend to the Debian booth to check it out (and possibly help
out with the technical setup).
-
We've got quite a bit of donations during the December holidays.
I've took the chance to thank donors, discuss what we do with
donations and the status
of publishing periodic Debian budgets.
-
Pinged by Yves-Alexis Perez, I've now properly documented the
fact that DDs are welcome to apply for hardware sponsoring, in case
the hardware can be used to
help/improve
their Debian work. As suggested by
Yves-Alexis, you can also advocate other DDs for hw
sponsoring.
-
Given hardware invariably age and that we can afford it, I've
prodded DSA to prepare a general hardware replacement plan for our
machines. Planning will go on this week-end and FOSDEM (thanks to
Martin Zobel-Helas and Faidon Liambotis for their presence here)
and I hope to have an approved machine replacement plan well before
the end of the current DPL term (although I'm usually
optimist...).
Important stuff going on
Other important stuff has been going on in various area of the
project in January. I'd like to point your attention to a couple of
things:
-
People active on debian-mentors have proposed an improved
work-flow to deal with sponsoring/mentoring requests, based on
the usage of a new pseudo package "sponsorship-requests". Thanks to
Ansgar Burchardt, Jakub Wilk, Arno T ll, and Gregor Herrmann for
working on this.
-
Raphael Hertzog has kickstarted work on DEP-2, as a way to
rationalize the flow of package-related information that
(co-)maintainers get. Discussion about the idea are ongoing on the
debian-qa mailing list.
Miscellanea
-
Work has further progressed in reaching out to companies with an
interest in giving support for, and contributing to Debian. Thanks
to Alexander Wirt the technical work is now done and
some sort of governance policy has been decided. Further step for
me is to announce it properly hoping to reach out to as many
interested companies as possible. I hope to finalize that in the
next month. (If you're working for such a company and you happen to
read this, feel free to reach out to me already.)
-
I've completed an old todo item setting up and documenting titanpad.debian.net,
service that has been requested for collaborative work during
various kinds of online events. Help is welcome to help
administering the service (see doc).
-
SPI has clarified the role of project representatives and, as a
consequence of that, I (as DPL) no longer receive SPI board
discussions addressed to board@spi. That is good not only for the
sanity of my inbox, but also because it puts all projects
affiliated to SPI at the same level of communication within SPI.
Thanks to Robert Brockway for his work on this.
In the unlikely case you've read thus far, thanks for your
attention! Happy Debian hacking.
PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at
master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*