Re: Another question for candidates.

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Havoc,

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 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.

In the email I just sent, I argue that the current practice is that people
don't excuse themselves when they have conflicts, and that we should keep it
like this.  Example: the discussion around whether Nautilus and/or Evolution
are part of Gnome 1.4.  I don't think people from Eazel and Helix Code excused
themselves from this discussion because of a conflict of interest.

Are you saying that we need to change the way we deal with conflicts?

Bart

>
>
> > 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
>
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