Re: Let's Stop Getting Torn Apart by Disagreement: Concerns about the Technical Committee
Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> I agree technically but I wonder whether strategic, ethical or social
> contract issues were given sufficient weight, or if the constitution
> even allows for such considerations. I don't know but this obviously
> would include some regard for the wider community, including users.
[...]
Hi Marty,
I probably shouldn't reply to more systemd discussion, but I do think this
has some relevance to the question of how to handle TC decisions more
generally, so I'm going to dive into this anyway. I believe this is an
example of the pattern that I identified in a previous message.
What I'm seeing in your message makes me believe that you are so firmly
convinced that systemd is evil, its developers are evil, and it is a
negative effect on free software that you are unable to comprehend how
someone could disagree with you. The only possibility is that they must
have somehow been prevented from taking those issues into account, either
by not giving them sufficient weight or because of some provision of our
governance structure, or because they were caught "off guard," or because
they're part of the corrupt conspiracy.
I was one of the Technical Committee members who was involved in this
decision. I have, and had, absolutely no affiliation with Red Hat
whatsoever (or Ubuntu, for that matter). I took strategic, ethical, and
social contract issues fully into account in making my decision. They
pointed me towards systemd. Other colleagues drew different conclusions.
We're independent human beings who arrive at different conclusions given
the same evidence. This is reality. Your model of governance and ethics
has to account for this, or it's useless.
I have heard all the arguments against systemd. I understand them fully.
I was not caught off-guard. I thought about them for months.
I believe those arguments range between valid but insufficient given the
weight of evidence in the other direction to outright incorrect. I
believe the overall characterization of the systemd project and its effect
on Debian is factually inaccurate.
You are fully entitled to continue to disagree with me. *But I am also
fully entitled to continue to disagree with you without being a plant or a
conspirator or a liar or a dupe.*
If your world view claims that people like me *do not exist*, your world
view is, well, wrong. And when you continue to make arguments on the
basis that it is somehow impossible to hold the view that I, in fact,
hold, you are in effect accusing me of being unethical. Of lying.
*This* is where I see the true source of the *ongoing* division in the
community. It's not over the technical decision. It's not even over the
decision-making process. It's that some people, most (but not all) of
whom seem to be opponents of systemd, are so completely confident that
they're right and that theirs is the only ethical position possible that
they repeatedly accuse anyone who disagrees with them of bad faith.
This is horrifically destructive, and extremely demoralizing, and if
anything is going to seriously hurt the Debian project as an ongoing
collective project, it's this attitude. Reasonable people disgree. We
want to continue to work together anyway. We can find ways through a lot
of different problems and challenges and disagreements as long as we can
unite around that principle. If we can't unite around that principle,
almost any disagreement has then potential to tear us apart.
The term for this in the broader world is "assume positive intent," and
it's one of the most important characteristics for any successful
large-scale collaboration.
The broader implication of this for the TC is that the TC deals with the
most divisive issues, where people have started lining up on sides and the
tendency to assume bad faith from the other side has become very strong.
Thankfully, very few are as bad as systemd, but some will be quite heated.
The TC is in the difficult position of trying to unwind some of that type
of conflict as well as making a decision that often won't make everyone
happy. It's extremely hard.
But one thing that the *rest* of us can do outside of the TC is to hang on
very tightly to that principle of assuming positive intent. We're all on
the same side. We're all trying to make Debian better. We just disagree
how to get there. We've all made a lot of judgement calls in the past,
and we've all been right sometimes, and we've all been *wrong* sometimes.
We can argue our sides, but at some point we just have to trust our fellow
project members and try to make the decision work. That's what makes
Debian a collective, collaborative project rather than just a technical
assembly of packages.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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