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Re: FYI: GNU Emacs Manual to be moved to non-free



Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org> wrote:

> Roland Mas <lolando@debian.org> writes:
> 
>      The problem is that the rules (guidelines, actually) for deciding
>      what we consider free enough to put in Debian, and what we don't,
>      do not emanate from the users but from our constitution and
>      social contract.
> 
> i'm no populist, but it strikes me no matter how you phrase it, that
> an organization dedicated to user freedoms has latent problems if its
> basic policy process doesn't emanate from the users.

Debian policy _doesn't_ emanate from its user base.  We're not Red Hat,
or any other commercial entity that has to do that.  Debian policy comes
from its members.

>    We are not restricting our users, like your remark seems to imply
>    we are.  We are restricting ourselves.
> 
> by restricting yourselves (in your mind, apart from the users) w/
> insufficient granularity, you end up in practice restricting the users
> anyway, driving them to help each other apart from you, and inducing
> their mistrust.

I think he means we member-drive, not user-driven.

What you say may be true, but Debian membership is high enough to have a
useful userbase.  :-)

It's not that we don't care about users, it's that we care more about
freeness.

Peter



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