Re: Summary? (Or: my vote is for sale!)
Adrian von Bidder wrote:
> I'm not going to vote, sorry. I don't have the time to wade through tons of
> mailing list archives, of which 1/3 is repetitions of previously made
> statements, 1/3 is presumably flames or close to it, and 1/3 is trivial
> corrections, with the few substantial arguments scattered in it...
>
> In short: did anybody do a reasonably balanced and concise writeup about
> what is going on on the firmware front regarding
> - what are the important arguments and counter-arguments?
> - who supports which options?
>
> (and no, this shouldn't just describe the GR which is in CfV state now, but
> the others floating around, too.)
I have to confess a similar viewpoint. And I've been *trying* to follow
this mailing list!
As I understand what's going on, instead of having a single vote with
all the firmware-related options laid out on the ballot, we are
apparently going to have a series of votes about related topics (GR
2006/004 being the first) with only the option to vote in favor or for
further discussion. This defeats the whole point of Condorcet voting -
instead of being able to rank the various proposed actions, voters will
have to say Yea or Nay (well, Further Discussion) on each item.
I am very tempted to vote Further Discussion (with the hope that it will
actually result in *no* further discussion), as a protest of the mess
that has been made out of this issue, on all ballots related to firmware.
Regarding the specific ballot on 2006/004, can anyone tell me how
passing it would change ANYTHING of import, other than annoying one of
the RMs [1]? Points B and D are "recommends" and "requests" so aside
from Debian taking a public stand on the issue, they are no-ops. Point
C is already in the social contract. The statement made in Point A has
been the case ever since GR 2004/003 changed the social contract from
covering "software" to "works" (indeed, this is recognized in the ballot
by calling point A a RE-affirmation).
[1] http://blogs.turmzimmer.net/2006/10/02#etch-gr-1
By shipping sourceless firmware in main, we are either already violating
the social contract or we are not. (My money is on the former, but
that's irrelevant to my point.) In either case, as stated above the
entire GR is a no-op. And if we are already violating the social
contract, why would passing a GR against this practice make us stop
doing so?
best regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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