Re: Non-Constitutional Voting Procedure
On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 12:52:02PM -0700, Seth Arnold wrote:
> > To return to the crux of the biscuit, article 1 of the social contract says
> > that commercial software will not be part of the "distribution", period.
> > Five then says that we will offer commercial software via FTP, those concepts
> > seem to be fundamentally at odds.
>
> Constitutionality aside, if non-free is removed from debian, I will miss
> acroread and netscape and unzip. (I don't usually need zip, since
> windows users can also grok .tar.gz with winzip)
unzip should be in main now - it's now got a free license.
Without regard to constitutionality, I believe there are technical reasons
why non-free should remain a little while longer. Netscape is the biggest
of them at the moment since currently Mozilla is not ready to replace it.
These are temporary. I personally wouldn't mind just seeing the mention
of non-free removed from the social contract so we may do what we feel is
morally correct given technical issues when the time comes without a chunk
of the social contract tying our hands and forcing us to support non-free
software indefinitely.
> I imagine some other people might miss their rsa and idea modules for
> gpg. (Which reminds me, why is the rsa module for gpg still in non-free?)
And why are people still using gpg-rsaref, hmm?
> Being the champions of free software doesn't always mean we have to be
> extremists about it. :)
That's debatable.. More and more a lot of people who actually care about
free software are feeling that Debian has become apathetic toward it and
are trying to push the other direction as hard as possible. I'm not
interested in that and I already feel that now is not the time for John's
proposal to pass.
However, I have little belief that it WILL pass, regardless of the
majority required. I don't even think John expects a simple majority vote
would pass at this point (and he's somewhat disappointed by this..) I
think I would be disappointed if the vote was overwhelmingly against as
the (seemingly largely uninformed) public opinion has been. I _AM_
disappointed that our secretary has decided how this vote will be handled
by fiat in a way that can best be described as ballot stacking in favor of
his personal preferences and setting a dangerous precedent in which the
secretary is essentially bound by no rules and has more authority over the
project than its leader does.
This ain't good. Far be it from me to advocate more red tape, but here's
an example of where Debian's bureaucratic system designed to ensure that
nobody is in complete control of the project without review is failing.
The secretary can arbitrarily change the rules for a GR vote and the only
way to appeal a decision made by the secretary is to have a GR vote ...
Unfortunately, I think this also brings to light what is IMO a shortcoming
of Wichert's leadership of the project. He hasn't even commented on this
subject and has essentially taken no steps to do anything about it.
Ignoring problems won't make them go away. This kind of thing has started
to become a problem, IMO, since I haven't seen Wichert involve himself in
any way with any controversial issues at all until they are essentially
resolved.
This GR is not one that Darren likes - that much is fairly evident from
other postings he's made on similar subjects found in archives. I feel
that as a result he's given it a second-class priority and is in fact
actively trying to ensure that it's never voted on with this latest
decision. John made his proposal, he got his seconds, he got several
vocal detractors who don't like it, and he followed constitutional
procedure to have his vote. Weeks and even months later, there is no vote
and by the looks of it, there never will be. That ain't right. If it's
going to fail, let it fail because the developers don't want to see the
social contract so easily modified or because they don't like the proposal
in general. Not because one person decides he wants the issue to die.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3
Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/) 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC
The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/) 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3
<dark> "Let's form the Linux Standard Linux Standardization Association
Board. The purpose of this board will be to standardize Linux
Standardization Organizations."
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