Re: Honesty in Debian (was Re: Amendment to GR on GFDL, and the changes to the Social Contract
On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 04:35:31PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:23:41AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > I don't see what that has to do with the simple fact of what the vote
> > was about and how it turned out.
>
> So, you think that the vote in itself is the important one, and that all the
> discussion that leads upto it can simply be ignored ? So, you dismiss the
I don't think the discussion is useless, no. I also don't think it has
any relevance in the context of your original post, and it certainly has
no relevance in the context of a discussion about whether a vote was
unanimous.
> > > The status quo in our voting system would have been none-of-the-above, so there
> > > was clearly a choice to keep non-free, if i remember well.
> >
> > That choice didn't express a prohibition on removing it, it was just an
> > effort to keep the question to arising again in the short term. It was
> > pretty successful at that.
>
> So, you claim that we didn't vote to keep non-free ? Kind of revisionism.
It's not revisionism. Read the amendment that was supported. It was to
"reaffirm support for non-free." It was not to "prevent non-free from
ever being removed."
The proposal to remove non-free was defeated, yes.
There was an amendment, which was accepted, stating that we still
support non-free, but which caused no actual change in policy or to the
project. In other words, it was a no-op, simply a "sense of the
developers" resolution that didn't cause any action to take place or
affect any change in policy.
There was not an affirmative statement saying that non-free will never
go away, or that it will never go away until the next GR.
> > > We did all vote, and the result of that vote was to keep non-free, and the
> >
> > Well, that's not correct either. A minority of developers voted, if I
> > remember correctly. Some 350 or so.
>
> Those that did vote did vote, and the result of that vote was to keep
> non-free. Those who did chose not to vote, did indeed chose so, but the result
> of the vote is not less binding on them because of that.
That is true. But it remains that it is incorrect to say that "we did
*ALL* vote", because not all of us did vote. Only a subset of us did.
> > But when you said "we all voted to keep it", that is incorrect. The
> > vote was not unanimous. I believe that about a third of those voting
> > wanted to remove it.
>
> So, what ? We did vote, the majority of the voters did vote to keep non-free,
> so the this means that we, the debian-project, did chos to keep non-free.
You said "we *ALL* voted to keep it", which means that every vote cast
was to keep non-free. In other words, the vote was unanimous.
It is quite clear that the vote was not unanimous, and you can see for
yourself that there was dissent in the discussion leading up to the
vote.
That is all I am saying. The vote was not unanimous, and it was not to
take any affirmative steps to alter not status of non-free.
We didn't vote to keep non-free forever. We voted not to remove it.
> > I'm not saying that the vote was invalid or anything. All I'm saying is
> > that it wasn't unanimous as you had said. There was disagreement at the
> > time.
>
> Sure, there is always disagreement, all i said is that the debian project
> voted in a GR, and that the result of that vote was that we should keep
> non-free. It is i believe quite valid to translate this above fact into the
> much shorter "we voted to keep non-free" sentence, and i really don't see what
You added the word *ALL* there, which made it incorrect, because you
were saying that *everyone* voted in that way. This is not the case.
> you aim to achieve by this arguing ? Playing with words to distract from the
> content of my post ? nit-picking just for the fun of it ?
I said that I agreed with what you said later. I was just correcting
the record, that's all. The vote was not unanimous, and it did not
result in any affirmative actions or policy changes regarding non-free.
-- John
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