Re: Another question for candidates.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au> writes: 
> Suppose a Foundation Board member works for (or holds shares in) a company
> that develops code for Gnome. Suppose also that another company hires this
> Gnome company to port a software package to the Gnome platform. This 
> package will compete directly with a current Gnome project which is making
> good progress.
> 
> Is the Foundation Board member in a position of conflict of interest?
>

It depends on whether the board member is being asked to make any
decisions about the free software GNOME package. If so, they would
need to abstain from voting on any such decisions. An example might be
whether the free package is in a GNOME release, etc. 
 
> Do you think that others might perceive the Foundation Board member to be
> in a position of conflict of interest?

Depending on the circumstances. Realistically, it's quite unlikely
that anyone outside of the member's company would know that they were
doing this porting work; it would almost 100% likely be under an NDA
agreement. So we would need to rely on the honesty of the board member
to remove themselves from decisions with this conflict.

Havoc