Maintainer's responsibility (was Re: [dp-tf] Quadlogy of person proposals)

Dear Elmar,

>>2. Maintainer created by LIR - bound by LIR contract.
> 
> 
> Not agreed. A lot of maintainers are pretty old, the link to the LIR
> (who may as well have gone out of business years ago) is not necessarily
> existent anymore. Moreover, a lot of maintainers have been created in
> order to relieve the LIR of the maintainance of customer objects (for
> customers who want to do that themselves). And, on another leg entirely,
> there isn't necessarily a special contract between LIR and customer
> that covers RIPE DB updates / maintainer issues. I don't see how the
> maintainer's owner would be bound by RIPE-LIR contracts.

You are right. I was thinking here mainly of the future (i.e. not
about the already existing objects).

A way to solve the problem of old objects is to keep track of maintainers
we know are bound by a contract and those that are not.

Eventually, we may have to treat in some special way those personal
objects that are not maintained by maintainers bound by a contract.
For example we may have to hide them, delete them, etc. Probably
hiding the data is better, as we can re-publish it if we can
get the contract with the maintainer.

> You will not be able to reach all (or even a majority) of maintainers in
> your lifetime. This is a hopeless case, I'm afraid.

I fully agree with you. This is somewhat similar to signing the
new service contract with all members. In last phase we still had
2-3% of the existing members who did not give any sign of life
and we had to cancel the contract with them. I think we can
have a similar approach here, we will eventually have to delete
"doubtful" data, i.e. data we are not sure we arte allowed to keep
in the database.

> If you are happy with like 50%, then it's doable.

I am afraid we have no other choice.

Best regards,
Janos