FloodBot status

Wed Feb 5 01:54:25 UTC 2014

Il 05.02.2014 02:27 Alan Bell ha scritto:

> On 05/02/14 00:32, ljlbox at tiscali.it [1]wrote:
>
>> The FloodBots have been disabled in #ubuntu.
>
> OK
>
>> They have more than once been said to be (no longer) very useful, 
>> and
>> often said to be a kludge. I don't think it makes sense to have them
>> anymore, especially after I was made aware the IRCC has considered
>> removing them as an experiment, but never really did, during times 
>> when
>> "certain fun happens".
>
> I have absolutely no idea what that is referring to, the IRCC 
> certainly
> hasn't considered or discussed removing them in the last two years.

I am referring to the #ubuntu-offtopic conversation at
http://privatepaste.com/f0649bc9a3/sb45y
See the last line specifically, about the alleged discussions.
As rww is part of our ops team, I assumed his statements about team
discussions would be truthful.

>> The FloodBot code had been on Launchpad at
>> https://launchpad.net/floodbot [2] since early 2012, with the
>> understanding, in concert with the IRCC, that after people would 
>> step
>> up to clean up and improve the code, eventually it would be made 
>> open
>> source. Nobody stepped up, and eventually, the Launchpad project was
>> locked by Canonical because "private" project became only acceptable
>> under payment, according to the email I received.
>
> I read through the code when it was put in the launchpad project, I
> reviewed it again today, it looks pretty good to me. I would be up 
> for
> improving it, if I had anything about it to improve. Same goes for
> cleaning, it might be best to have a separate file with the various
> constants and configuration parameters in it, but that would mean
> changing the propagate routine that currently updates it as a single
> file, once I figured out that doing the cleanup I wanted to do would
> lead to modifying that I figured the costs of doing it didn't 
> outweigh
> the benefits. I don't think the bzr repo is locked, I think you just
> can't file private bugs in it or something.

I don't really know. The email I got from Launchpad sounded like it 
would
stop working, but I didn't pay overly much attention to it.

> I would also note that there
> was a request from a freenode staffer to add ~freenode-staff to the
> project so they could help with the review and cleanup, but you 
> didn't
> want us to open it up to them, so we didn't.

I certainly wasn't keep on opening it up to them, since their 
"criticism"
was part of the reason I wanted it cleaned up in the first place.
That was briefly discussed with the IRCC in #ubuntu-irc-council during
2012. Members of the IRCC were additionally under the impression 
freenode
staff were meaning to "study" the code, rather than improve it.

> As you were keen not to
> have many people with access to the code it kind of fell to the few
> people who did have access to it, I am not sure what the others 
> thought,
> but I thought the code was fine.

I certainly didn't intend for the code to only be available to the IRC
Council (the only people currently with access to it). Our 
understanding
was that any requests to obtain access to it would have been forwarded 
to
me.
There is no doubt I might have denied some of them (like I did with the
freenode staff one), or there would be no point in it being 
closed-source
until I was comfortable otherwise, no?

Note that, in the 2012 discussion, to the statement:
"there are two problems from LjL's point of view. 1) he doesn't want to
open source them while the code is ugly, and 2) he wants to be able to
trust he's putting them in good hands"

I responded:
"there's also a point 3 which i'll only mention here. half the world is
either calling them crap or implying they are. i'm not fond of the idea
of open sourcing my code just to see people i don't like laugh at it."

So, as you can see, the problem I've had with certain remarks, like the
ones pastebin'd above, is an old enough issue and I really believe 
there
was enough forewarning from my part about that being a problem for me.

>> I would like to point out that the FloodBot code is under my 
>> exclusive
>> copyright, it has never been licensed for redistribution, and any
>> license text it may even have contained was provisional and only 
>> meant
>> for internal use.
>
> it does indeed have a GPLv2 boilerplate at the top of it.

It does, but that's because the repository was MEANT for eventually
making the code public and open source, AFTER people had worked on it.
It was never meant as a "release" to anyone, nevermind the public at 
large,
of GPLv2 code. The Launchpad metadata clearly state "proprietary".

> e or distribution of the FloodBot code is NOT authorized by the
>> copyright holder; any exception would have to be agreed upon in
>> private, and I would confirm it on this mailing list.
> particular reason for that, and any reason for disabling them? I have
> been rather inattentive of IRC over the last month or so, with other
> things going on in real life, I feel I have missed some important bit 
> of
> context here.

Well, the reason for denying redistribution is that, you know, 
properietary
code is proprietary, and that's what that means.
The conditions for it being open-sourced weren't fulfilled (for longer 
than
two years), so it's still proprietary.

Hopefully, I've made the reasons for disabling them clearer by linking 
to
the rww/Adran discussion, although I'd like to point out once more that
similar issues had arisen several times before, as the entire IRCC was 
well
aware after those 2012 discussions that led to the Launchpad project 
being
created.

I was initially prepared for this to be a "temporary break", like rww
suggested had been in the IRCC's intentions, to see what things would 
look
like without any FloodBots in place, and then an official IRCC 
decision...
However, from the (heated) discussion there were in #ubuntu-ops and
#ubuntu-ops-team today, it seems clear that unless I brought the bots 
back
right away, people weren't prepared to wait and be subjected to my 
"whim".

by LjL
ljlbox at tiscali.it
ljl at ubuntu.com

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