Re: Thanks and Decision making working group (was Re: General Resolution: Statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board result)
Hi,
On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 10:45:29PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > Debian is a political project that promotes the autonomy of users vis-a-vis
> > large organizations such as corporations and governments. It does this by
> > promoting the creation of free software, and by fostering a community
> > around free software.
> in the 1990s I would have agreed with you, but the world has changed.
> Nowadays a big part of the community around free software are
> large corporations.
Yes, and this caused a massive shift in the power dynamic between users and
corporations.
A core component of the operating system we ship is so complex that it
needs to be maintained by full-time employees. This has effectively given
the corporation employing these people veto power over our technical
decisions, because even though the software they ship is technically free
software, the cost of maintaining a fork is higher than a volunteer
organization can afford sustainably.
We already know this mechanism as "Embrace and Extend", and it is designed
to create dependence. In the past, we have called this out for what it is,
and actively counteracted it because dependence is not in the interest of
our users.
The same corporation has also issued a statement on the reelection of RMS
to the FSF board, so apparently they don't feel the need to be "apolitical"
in the interest of not alienating "valuable" contributors, so I fail to see
what we are trying to achieve here.
Simon
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