Open Stack

On 2016-08-26 05:40:31 -0700 (-0700), Anne Gentle wrote:
[...]
> I'd be comfortable with an archive policy that keeps all documents
> (project repos, openstack-manuals, api-site) for two years and
> then backs them up to a storage area that is not accessible from
> the web.

Probably the closest thing we have to this is our server backups
(implemented using software called "bup"). Their purpose is to be
able to restore the previous state of our important systems in the
event of loss or compromise of service, so possibly not the same
thing you're desiring here. Also, identifying which documents are
"older" than a certain date is nontrivial (we can delete files last
modified before a certain date, but does that actually achieve the
same result?).

How about taking this from the revision control perspective... we
(presumably) have the source used to build that rendered form of the
documentation all the way back to the beginning, and if someone
really needs (for legal reasons) a copy of it then they can expend
the resources to figure out how to render it again?

> Lana, I believe you should review that with legal and the Foundation.
> There's the legal-discuss mailing list to get that started.
[...]

[I am not a lawyer and I'm responding as a concerned member of the
community, not representing the opinions of my employer.]

I won't object to anyone consulting lawyers, but I'm pretty sure the
Foundation (the only legal entity we really have in this context) is
under no contractual obligation to maintain documentation at all for
software produced by the community. It's probably best to start out
asking them from that angle, rather than soliciting their opinions
on how long they think old releases of software should have rendered
documentation on a Web site (that latter question is something the
community and in particular the community members working on that
content and those systems should be free to decide).

I can understand the sort of legal paranoia which infects business
uses for documentation, but meeting those requirements falls on
those businesses. For example, Rackspace almost certainly retains
old versions of any documentation they've produced and published on
their site, some of which may be derived from old versions of
OpenStack upstream documentation, but meeting their document
retention requirements is not the legal responsibility of the
OpenStack community at large (how would any court even be able to
enforce such a requirement on our community itself?).

If the OpenStack Foundation really is somehow legally responsible
for keeping and publishing old copies of OpenStack software
documentation, that's something they would need to do directly as
well. They have no authority to impose those requirements on the
community, and to my knowledge not even any mechanisms in place
through which they could ensure it's happening anyway.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley