On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 10:01:16AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > > > Actually, the developer is choosing to have Debian distribute a package, and > > > > others are trying to stop Debian from distributing the package. > > > Word games. Censorship is when a citizen of one body chooses to have > > > that body distribute something (by being a citizen and distributing > > > it), and another citizen tries to stop them. > > Gah! Book publishers do not publish every manuscript that is sent > > to them. Movie studios do not fund every screenplay sent to them. > > Libraries, as has been mentioned before, don't buy every book. > You seem to be suggesting that any case where an organisation doesn't > publish something is not censorship. That's obviously wrong, because > some of them *are* censorship. > > Such choices are made *all the time*. It's the difference between > > "editing" and "censoring". > The difference being that editing is a choice made by the person doing > the work, while censorship is a choice made by an otherwise unrelated > person in the same organisation. > Editing would be if the maintainer decided to remove the > package. Censorship is when some other developer tries to force him. If an ftp-master in the course of "doing the work" of processing NEW rejects a package, or a member of the release team in the course of "doing the work" of preparing the next stable release excludes a package from consideration, is this editing, or is it censorship? If they do so for legal reasons? If they do so for technical reasons? If they do so because, in their estimation, doing so improves the quality of the distribution? Publishing houses never let writers edit their own work -- at least until they're famous and have mindless followers who'll buy and read any formulaic tripe they slap together. I don't think I like the idea of Debian becoming the Stephen King of the Open Source world. It's extremely frustrating to see so many words spent on the notion of "censorship" here. At the end of the day, Debian, *as an organization*, has the right (and responsibility) to decide what it publishes on behalf of its member developers, and doing so is *not* *censorship*. Even if that happens to mean adopting policies that some significant minority fraction of the developership disagrees with. It's no wonder that Debian has a hard time reaching any sort of consensus these days when we have developers who are happy as a pig in mud to argue ad infinitum about whether the project has a right to *exercise* consensus. And it's no wonder that Debian is slow to release when people are criticized on public lists for showing an interest in the contents and quality of packages that aren't theirs; for daring to ask the question, "is this something that Debian needs?" I've seen people make comments in this thread that hot-babe is just one more package among thousands, and that uploading it doesn't mean integrating it with the OS. I think this attitude lies at the heart of one of Debian's biggest problems today, namely that far too many developers seem to look on Debian as nothing more than a package pool instead of as an OS. I'm sorry, but "package pool" has been done before -- it's called rpmfind.net, I've lived it, and it sucked. That's not what I'm after as a member of this project, and I hope it's not what most other developers are after either, but making an OS instead of a package pool takes developers who are willing to look at issues outside the narrow confines of their own packages. It means looking precisely *towards* questions of better integration between packages, to provide something cohesively whole. Sometimes, it means asking yourself that hard question, "does my pet package, the 24th app in class foo, make Debian a better OS, or is there some other way I could be contributing that would improve the quality of Debian for everyone?" This discussion shouldn't be about censorship, or other forms of coercion; no one with anything remotely resembling the power to do so has actually suggested suppressing this package. It shouldn't be about legality; there's scant little evidence that cartoon drawings of naked breasts are illegal in any jurisdiction where Debian wouldn't already have serious problems. What it *should* be about is moving towards a consensus, *together with the maintainer*[1], about what we want Debian to be. And contrary to much of the rhetoric in this thread, it is possible to think a package like hot-babe is a bad idea without wanting to be set up as a censor for all ideas they disagree with. ObRC: 283476 -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer [1] Did anyone else notice that none of the people carrying on in this thread is the ITPer, and very few of the messages are actually addressed towards him?
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