Hello Russ, Scott, On Fri 04 Jan 2019 at 11:44am -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> writes: >> I am concerned about Debian becoming over-politicized (beyond the core >> issue of Free Software, which has an inherent political aspect). I like >> that the diversity statement isn't anti-anything. > > Well, I'm in the camp that says that Debian is a political project at its > very core, and there's very little about Debian that has ever been *not* > political. But I realize this is an ongoing argument over what > "political" means. (I think a lot of people have an unreasonably narrow > definition.) I wonder if Scott's notion of Debian becoming over-politicised is the idea that more explicit political agreement is being required in order to participate? Something that fascinates me about Free Software is that very different political positions generate reasons to support its spread. Economic libertarians, socialists and anarchists, for example, all have good -- but different -- reasons to support Free Software. For my own part, one huge advantage of participating in Free Software projects is the opportunity to come to understand the quite different reasons that other people have for upholding the same standards of freedom in software. Scott, would it be right to describe your concern as the worry that participation in Debian seems to be coming to require a political position that has more in common with other participants than simply the property of generating reasons to support the spread of Free Software? (I'm not expressing a view about whether I take that concern to be valid. I'm just trying to see if I've understood where Scott is coming from any better.) -- Sean Whitton
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