An Open Letter to Darren, Wichert, and Raul

[tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

This is a letter to Darren, Wichert, and Raul.  It's not an invitation
for everybody to comment and discuss and modify.  It's not any kind of
proposal under the official resolutions procedure.  It's a letter to
those three, only those three, in the hopes that they will proceed to
action.  It's my advice, a concrete suggestion, which they would I
hope consider, and then do what they think proper.

We seem to be in a deep stinking morass, and I think Manoj's latest
emails have jarred me out of my tendency to focus on procedure.  

Manoj identifies three actual issues:

1) Can we modify the social contract, and if so, what kind of majority
   is required (simple, 2:1, 3:1, etc)?

2) Do we want to modify the social contract, and remove bits of the
   non-free stuff therein?

3) Do we remove vestiges of non-free packages from Debian machins and
   the BTS?

There is a clear logical relationship between these three.  Number (3)
is only relevant if (2) passes.  And in turn, the method of deciding
(2) clearly depends on the result of (1).

I propose then that the developers vote first on (1), in the form of
alternative constitutional amendments.  Unless (1) resulted in "the
social contract is immutable", then (2) would go out, and be judged
under the majority requirement established in (1).  And finally, if
(2) passed, then (3) would go out as a normal GR.  If any of these
resulted in "more discussion", then the later stages would wait until
the conclusion of that discussion and a decision.

(It might be argued that if (2) doesn't pass, then (3) would still
make sense.  I don't know.  John Goerzen's original resolution would
have done both (2) and (3), but they are indeed logically separable.
It's possible to remove the language about non-free from the social
contract without removing packages from the archive.)

I have one meta-plea.  This process has been greatly muddled by the
lack of any kind of visible attention to it on the part of the
Secretary.  This is a voluntary organization, and Darren's work has
until now been superb, and I understand completely if other
responsibilities prevent him from giving his attention to the demands
of being Secretary at this time.  But in that case, he owes it to the
project to hand it over to Raul so that we can move on.

There has been a general opacity about the entire process here.  The
Constitution promises a procedure, and a formal method of getting to
decisions, but because of the secretary's apparent abandonment of the
process, things only get worse, with yet more proposals stacked up,
and no decision or votes in sight.  Even when a vote was issued, it
was hopelessly confusing.  When the vote was about to expire, and the
promised second ballot had not appeared, I said "what's up" and again,
no response at all.  This is not tolerable.  Matters (1), (2), and (3)
are extremely important to the project, much more important than the
choice of a Debian logo.  It is not acceptible to let it slide and
hope it goes away; that only produces the result that in fact the
developers are not in control at all.

Thomas