Re: Can't We Have Another Vote for Systemd (Coup)
On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 07:52:33AM -0700, Gregory Smith wrote:
> And the answer is no!
> Of course.
>
> The debian founding documents state that debian was created for the benefit
> of the user.
> (The premise of the whole free software movement is the rights of the user:
> the developers rights are clearly best served by the standard proprietary
> copyright regime)
> We are told that any vote by the user would be, in a word, disrespectful of
> the founding documents!
>
> We are then informed that because earlier a general resolution by some
> attentive debian package maintainers failed there shall never be another
> attempt. Of course this earlier attempt occurred before everyone decided to
> update to Jessie from wheezy, but that makes no difference.
>
> How convenient.
>
> The fact of the matter is that the technical committee even ruling on this
> matter was an illegal abuse of process. Such wide ranging changes which are
> not purely technical in nature Must go to a general resolution to be voted
> on by all of the debian package maintainers. The abuse of the technical
> committee, which is stacked with former or current redhat and
> ubuntu(canonical) employees was intentional. It came just at the time when
> the correct person was in the chairmanship.
>
> What has occurred in debian can be described as a coup.
> And the trajectory has followed the standard coup path: a beurocratic organ
> was used to over ride and subvert a formally democratic body, then once
> such was completed the decision made by a few was declared fiat complete,
> then harsh critics of the new regime were silenced, and the population
> informed that they had two choices: conform or get out.
>
> You can see the same in Egypt today. Same mechanisms. They use bullets
> though, rather than bans.
An example in the software domain would be the process by
which Microsoft got its OOXML document "standard" approved
by the ISO technical committee.
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20051216153153504
For those who don't know (or recall) Groklaw provided
factual journalism and investigative resources, initially
for the SCO vs. IBM and associated trials, where SCO
claimed ownership of Linux. These cases dragged out for
the better part of a decade. Microsoft was shown to
have funded and backed SCO.
Groklaw also accomplished a large part of the huge task
of transcribing to searchable text the transcripts of
the Microsoft vs. Comes trial, where many of MS's
illegal practices were revealed.
In a better world the Groklaw community would be here today
to analyze this issue. Pamela Jones froze the site when it
became clear that email traffic among her correspondents was
being monitored, that the confidentiality of communications
channels essential to running the site was no longer
trustworthy.
I would say that systemd takeover of major Linux distributions
and of Debian in particular would be a perfect subject
for Groklaw.
> Debian, in its founding documents, like the free software movement it once
> belonged to in fact and in spirit, was created for the users. It is not, by
> fiat, a doacracy.
>
> When it was created the users of debian and some of the programmers who
> created the "upstream" as it is now called were the debian packagers. Since
> then a new class that is neither user nor programmer has arising and stuck
> itself between us, all the while kicking the actually productive free
> software developers out of debian for social crimes.
>
> That is the story, that is what has happened. They have taken our Linux
> distribution from us. The Frenchman above me is one of that number.
--
Joel Roth
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