Re: DEMOCRATICAL election of Codenames of Debian [Before "Re: And next name after Sarge? or PROPOSAL for Codenames' election"]
On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 10:53:28AM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote: 1) I
> > think that the democratical election of codenames is essential and
> > it should were part of the political of debian. "How much"
> > democratic or in what way it's democratic are things that you (the
> > organization and developers of Debian) could discuss. I only
> > suggested a solution for doing it.
>
> Oh, please. Go and fix a bug or something.
Those who can, fix bugs. Those who can't, make "constructive
suggestions". :-)
Seriously, democracy is not the elixir for all ills. Democracy takes
time, and sometimes the will of the masses is not necessarily the
course of wisdom. For example, Hitler was elected using a democratic
process.
On the flip side, in the kernel that you are likely using, Linus
Torvalds makes arbitrary decisions about which patches are accepted or
not accepted into the mainline, from which there is no appeal.
In contrast, NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD have democratically elected core
teams, with lots of politics, people being thrown off the core teams,
and in at least one case, a project fork happening because on of the
people on the losing side of one of these political fights stomped off
and formed his own project. I will leave it as an exercise to the
reader which of Linux vs. NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD has been more
successful, and whether the presence of Linus Torvalds as "the benign
dictator" had anything to do with it.
Yes, it's important to have safeguards against tyranny; but it's also
important to know when those safeguards can dispensed with in the name
of Getting Work Done.
- Ted
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