On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 10:56:34AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > I don't believe I have the moral authority to tell aj that he's wrong to > follow the Social Contract more strictly than I would. Do you? It's pretty rare in Debian that anyone is able to tell someone what to do on moral authority alone. Normally an explanation and justification is required and we attempt to achieve a consensus -- ie, a common understanding of what the best thing to do is amongst the interested parties. As Joey's pointed out on his blog, we're doing less of this than we have in the past. I don't think it's a good trend, but others' mileage may vary. This isn't a matter of interpreting the social contract strictly or loosely -- there's no ambiguity anymore on this issue. I don't think it's reasonable to choose to follow the social contract "loosely" -- the whole point of promises and contracts is that the folks bound by them don't get to choose how to follow them. If we really don't want a Social Contract, then we can get rid of it, or change it to the "Debian Social Guidelines" or a "Debian's Goals" document that says what we're aiming towards without implying that we've already achieved it. But moral authority doesn't come into it at any point -- thinking about the issues and the consequences is what we need to be doing, not relying on other people to do our thinking for us, and hoping it turns out we agree with them after the fact. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> Don't assume I speak for anyone but myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Protect Open Source in Australia from over-reaching changes to IP law http://www.petitiononline.com/auftaip/ & http://www.linux.org.au/fta/
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