On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 06:41:31PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > Matthew Garrett wrote: > > Josh Triplett <josh.trip@verizon.net> wrote: > > > >>"The opinions of debian-legal" consist of the opinions of all those > >>developers and non-developers who participate on this list. This is not > >>a closed list. If the opinions of some developers diverge from the > >>opinions on debian-legal, then those developers should start > >>participating on debian-legal and expressing their opinions. > > > > Yes, in an ideal world that would be the case. In the world we live in, > > people have been intimidated away from participating in debian-legal > > because of the debating style and perceived extremism of certain > > participants. Refusal to acknowledge that is likely to end up leading to > > debian-legal having no influence whatsoever. > > That is unfortunate. As far as I know, the only "debating style" on > debian-legal is "be prepared to debate logically, and not just assert". > I certainly acknowledge that various members of debian-legal hold > extreme positions on various issues, but I tend to believe that the > collective consensus is more moderate, albeit biased by self-selection > towards those who care about legalistic issues. Actually it's just a trivial tautology: The people who participate on -legal are the ones who care about this stuff. The people who don't care about this stuff tend to believe that the sort of stuff discussed on -legal (be it freedom or simple legality) should not be allowed to influence the project, since they don't care about it. They tend to resort to histrionics, since anything else would be participation, which would be self-defeating. All I can think of to say to them is: sod off. (There's a third group who don't care enough to discuss these issues and are willing to submit to the consensus of the developers, excepting those who don't care about it, which is the definition of -legal) -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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