The Fedora Council is considering a formal conflict-of-interest policy and inviting community feedback on the draft.
The Fedora Project is in the process of developing a conflict of interest policy.
According to Aoife Moloney, a project manager and Fedora council member, the need for spelling out the organization’s policy regarding conflicts of interest first surfaced about a year-and-a-half ago.
“A decision made by a governance group in Fedora that removed someone’s ability to contribute to the project in a certain way,” she said Thursday in a post on Fedora’s forum. “This decision was later overturned and a number of improvement opportunities came out of what was not the nicest of scenarios for anyone to be in.”
One of the “improvement opportunities” was to at least “look into creating a conflict of interest policy.”
It’s surprising to me that Fedora doesn’t already have a conflict of interest policy, which is something I’d expect from small distros with no corporate connections. Fedora is backed by Red Hat, which even before it was owned by IBM was a major public company — large enough to insist that everything it touched was covered by a conflict of interest policy — to keep its lawyers happy if for no other reason.
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Indeed, such policies are usually the rule. The Linux Foundation, Software in the Public Interest, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, Open Source Initiative, and KDE e.V. all have some kind of conflict of interest policy in effect.
Fedora’s Draft Policy
The Fedora Council has done more than merely look into developing conflict of interest policy and has actually come up with a draft proposal, which Moloney included in her post. According to her, the proposal is not only a draft in the sense that it’s a work in progress, but it’s also a document to help the council decide if adding a policy is actually necessary.
“We, the council, would like to hear our community’s thoughts on needing a conflict of interest policy or guidelines, and if yes, the suitability of the one below for our project’s needs,” she said, adding that the issue will be brought up at the next council meeting, scheduled for this Wednesday.
“We intend to discuss this topic again during this meeting (and probably after that too) and would like to have some feedback from the community to consider as well.”
I’m guessing some kind of conflict of interest guideline will eventually be passed. From where I sit, about the only people who are going to be opposed to such a policy are the same people who get tied up in knots over codes of conduct.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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