Risky Practice

The following thread came in my email today and it made me very concerned about what may be a very risky practice for the Drupal Association to be doing. For the good of the project I think this needs to be addressed quickly. I suggest discussing with lawyers, preferably ones familiar with both U.S. and international trade law and antitrust practices as these areas are likely in play.

Drupal.org is clearly the #1 key venue for Drupal advertising and as such may run into special legal issues. What this thread seems to show is that an arbitrary, undefined and mostly undocumented process for granting preferential access to that venue is currently in use. IANAL but as I understand things from a lay businessman's perspective since d.o is a "vital" place to do business then denying and/or restricting who has access to prime advertising space in that business venue could put the D.A. into a position of being charged with arbitrary discrimination and/or erecting "barriers to trade" without adequate justification. There is also the potential for being charged with libel by refusing advertising position, implying defacto that a given company is incompetent and/or unqualified to do business with.

I am sure a quality-of-service screening process is appropriate but if that process has no objective measures then the D.A. runs the risk of creating legal nightmares for themselves. My recommendation is (A) get a very objective and measurable (including timeframes) screening process in place A.S.A.P. with the guidance of lawyers skilled in these specific matters, or (B) drop all barriers to admission into the d.o advertising space [very undesirable as that would be chaos], or (C) remove all self-promotion links of any kind from the d.o [which is extremely infeasible considering the number of commercial entities contributing both directly and indirectly to the project].

PS: I would strongly recommend against any effort to try and move such a process out of sight of the d.o community ... secret decision making processes and clandestine cabals in an open source community can become septic very fast.

LINK --> http://drupal.org/node/969226
Quick Summary:

1. Vendor "Morningstar (Europe)", via **Webmasters Queue** formally requested inclusion in the d.o **Service Directory* on 11-Nov-2010. Within hours a d.o Webmaster gave a +1. After that the issue ticket became mostly dormant.
2. On 02-Jan-2011 a d.o community member also gave a +1 and declared RBTC but the community member's RBTC was reversed *because they were not a d.o Webmaster*.
3. Discussion ensued over two weeks which prompted this post.
4. Vendor has now been excluded for more than 2 months from the Services Directory listing due (at least in part) to a lack of a clear process.

Relevant passages:

A Community Member (non-webmaster):

Right- only those with the special magic fairy dust can vet these firms. Imagine if we let anyone with community cred come in and review these issues, they might even get taken care of.

incidentally, I know that the webmasters love to make up random capricious rules (esp. when it helps alienate the Drupal business community), but since that's not an actually documented rule, let's go ahead and stick to the broader community rules.

I vetted them, the second person to do so, so this is RTBC, unless we're now requiring 3 +1s or you're saying that "community" doesn't apply here.

A Webmaster (defacto d.o representative & decision maker):

It seems to me that Morningtime hasn't reached (yet!) the level of contribution we generally are expecting for companies listed in the Services directory.

The Vendor:

What would that level be?

Is there minimum X modules/themes to maintain? I thought showcases/Drupal outreach also counted. I am a one person sole-proprietorship and unless I'm wrong I've seen freelancers get listed with less to show for than I do.

It would really help people if there were concrete rules to get listed. Measurable numbers like X modules, Y themes, Z showcases. I'll start by adding 1-2 themes soon and come back here then.

For the record, I do not know any of these persons and have no vested interest in the success or failure of the vendor involved. My sole concern is the well being of the project and the community and sometimes that means asking the hard questions that need to be asked.