Re: Free Linux Kernel

[Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>]

On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 22:23, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 09:02:40AM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> > On Sun, 2004-06-27 at 21:34, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> > > I had been working on cleansing it, but have gotten depressed by the hostile
> > > response from some of the Debian kernel maintainers and the dead silence
> > > from upstream.
> > 
> > >From memory, there's someone on lkml who has a "list" of the non-free
> > bits of the kernel. If you post and ask, you might get a response.
> > 
> > And be assured - there is a silent (perhaps even majority) waiting in
> > the wings who will solidly support such efforts/ results.
> 
> Please don't use "silent majority" arguments.  By definition we don't know
> the opinions of people who haven't shared those opinions with us.
> 
> If people don't have the backbone to stand up to the assertion that the
> Linux kernel is merely an anthology of C source files, then this sort of
> cravenness is something for which they need to be held to account.

I shall provide the example from which I (perhaps unacceptably)
extrapolated:

WINE's license change from X/BSD to (L)GPL: I don't have the links at
hand, but the overwhelming "strength of discussion" was against the
license change.

Then the vote was held, with a high majority in favour of the license
change.

To summarise:

Vote results will not necessarily bear any resemblence to the
"conclusions" of discussion on a mailing list.

Such an outcome is perhaps rare, who knows, but there is at least that
one example.

My reply above should have read "... majority) number waiting in the
wings...". The sentence is clearly missing such a word - I wrote it too
quickly and didn't proof.

Finally, my "silent majority" comment above is clearly a conjecture
("perhaps") and not an 'argument', and my email was one of (personal)
support for Nathanael, to give him encouragement where he felt
hostility.

Other than all that, I agree that "silent majority" is not a valid
argument. Now if I'd actually attempted to use it as such...

zenaan