On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 01:57:55AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Hi Branden,
>
> In your platform this year, you mention a grounding in legal issues as one
> of the things that you have to offer the project as DPL.
Yes.
> Over the past year, there has been a great deal of controversy (I dare
> say moreso than in preceding years) over the role of the debian-legal
> list in defining our concept of Free Software.
I agree with that assessment. There is either a perception that the -legal
mailing list has become a more "radical" place, or there are people
repeating this opinion after they hear it from others without bothering to
evaluate the traffic on -legal for themselves.
> How would you respond to critics that would claim your prominence in
> debian-legal marks you for an extremist, not a consensus-builder?
I'd say that's a pretty loaded question. :)
If mere "prominence" on debian-legal marks one as an extremist, then there
are many people who qualify as "extremists", including Sven Luther, who
posted, by my reckoning, 303 messages to -legal between January and
September of last year.
It's worth considering the question of whether prominence equals extremism.
To that end, I dashed off a quick Python script (attached) and fed it my
debian-legal folder, which in its present state contains all the mails I've
been sent from that list (I subscribe to it) since 1 January 2004.
Here are the top ten contributors to the list over the past 14 months or so.
The number on the left is the number of posts made from the address on the
right.
588 From: Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>
540 From: Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>
459 From: Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>
425 From: MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com>
409 From: Josh Triplett <josh.trip@verizon.net>
370 From: Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>
363 From: Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org>
303 From: Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>
294 From: Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org>
288 From: Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
I would also say that such critics haven't been paying very close attention
lately. I've made a total of 14 posts to debian-legal in the past 6
months. For a list with a monthly volume that seldom drops below 200
messages, and with nearly 500 subscribers[1], that seems like a pretty
modest presence to me. I did this largely as an experiment, given Matthew
Garrett's accusations that debian-legal is "out of touch" with the concerns
of developers. (Interestingly, Mr. Luther and I stopped contributing
substantially to the mailing list at about the same time, which means he
"out-prominenced" me, so to speak. Did he also "out-extreme" me?)
People who accuse me of extremism should therefore ask themselves: is
debian-legal a less extreme place now that my presence is nearly
nonexistent? If not, why not? If so, then have I not solved the problem?
"Extremism" in any case is just red-herring language, a charge without
substance. It tells one nothing about a person's actual views, except
presumably that one's views are not in alignment with the speaker. It
offers little more to a reasoned discussion than calling someone "bad".
The ubiquity of the term "extremist" in U.S. political discourse, a field
almost uniformly ridiculed by the U.S.'s fellow developed nations, may
suggest a link between its use and the absence of substantive debate.
"Consensus-building" is the flip side of the coin. It's a generic
feel-good term. One can build consensus in favor of all sorts of things,
and you may mentally insert your own invocation of Godwin's Law here.
What's important is what people concretely stand for and why. Claiming to
stand on principle is easy. Actually grappling with the real-world
consequences of one's decisions is another. As far as painting in broad
strokes goes, I did so in my platform[2]:
Our commitment to empowering people through software freedom, real
choices, and mastery over rather than servitude to the computing
experience continues to inspire me, and is why I have remained a
developer.
These are the goals I perceive the Debian Project as pursuing, and I share
them. I'm in favor of things that give people more, not less, control over
their computers, and consequently their lives. If you have some specifics
you'd like to point to, whether to understand my reasoning or simply to
draw out my "extremism", I welcome such inquiries.
I don't think consensus-building is all that hard as long as common,
relevant goals can be agreed upon. Until and unless people can identify
such goals, however, it's my experience that "consensus-building" is code
language for "horse trading". Am I a good horse-trader? Am I, for
instance, willing to overlook the flaws in the Apple Public Source License
2.0 so that we have the howl library in main[3]? No, I am not, and it
appears the consensus of my fellow developers is that we, as a project,
should not either.
Let me turn your question around a bit, then, and ask you:
* Do you feel the decision to move howl to non-free reflects the
consensus of Debian developers?
* If so, how useful was the debian-legal mailing list to
determining that this consensus existed?
* If not, why was the action undertaken?
* If debian-legal was not actually useful in discerning the
consensus of the project's developers, what means was used
instead?
Consider this your opportunity to educate me. :)
Thanks for your question. If I did not answer satisfactorily, please
indicate so in a follow-up message.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-legal.png
[2] http://people.debian.org/~branden/dpl/campaign/2005/platform.xhtml
[3] Message-ID: <20050120093050.GF9785@mauritius.dodds.net>
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00796.html
--
G. Branden Robinson | The more you do, the more people
Debian GNU/Linux | will dislike what you do.
branden@debian.org | -- Gerfried Fuchs
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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