Re: The constitution and the social contract
Hi Raul,
On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 07:36:09PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
>
> Best resolution I can imagine is: we ratify the social contract
> as having the same significance as the constitution.
>
> So, I'm proposing the following consitutional ammendment (to be
> appended to the bottom of the current constitution):
>
>
> C. The Social Contract
>
> Just as this constitution specifies how Debian decides what to
> do, the Social Contract specifies what Debian is. As Debian
> will occasionally need to redefine itself, the procedure for
> modifying the Social Contract shall be the same as the procedure
> for modifying this Constitution.
Pasting such a significant change of content of the constitution and
formal raise of relevance of the DFSG at the end of constitution as an
appendix is completely inappropriate and ill-advised.
The existing appendices A and B only elaborate on what is said in the
constitutional points 1 to 9, they don't contain any additional surprises.
Your appendix C would add an exception to the whole constitution, "hidden"
at the end of the document, and probably contradicting (overriding?) article
4 of the constitution.
Also, it stands isolated and with no example in the document as it is now.
It doesn't seem to fit well with the Introduction:
It does not describe the goals of the
Project or how it achieves them,
by indirectly giving a particular document which describes the goals a
higher value than other documents without formal justification (out of the
blue). In fact, your wording practically adds the DFSG to the constitution,
it's like c&p the DFSG into it, clearly contradicting the intent and wording
of the constitution. There is no formal basis in the current constitution for
such an exception, and this is not an accident, but was done intentionally, as
the Ian link you posted shows. (Note that the constitution does carefully allow
to be used by other projects, by just replacing the introduction and "Debian",
and the few references to SPI as well as article 9 for non-SPI projects.)
This proposal should be rejected for formal reasons. It's the wrong wording
in the wrong place. Nobody should feel tempted to support this proposal just
to give the DFSG more weight: Although Manojs proposal has similar problems,
it is at a more appropriate place in the document, and of less impact, as
only a different quorum is specified for certain documents.
BTW, I find the wording to be extremely poor. It doesn't really give a
rationale why the DFSG gets this special status. It's all noise except
for "the procedure for modifying ... " to the end.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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