[ Moving the discussion to -project. Please do remember to drop -vote from the recipients list if you follow up. ] On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 10:09:52AM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > > > Your lawerish-like interpretation of everything that happens in Debian > > > > (I assume that was a typo for "lawyerish".) > > > > For the record, I am offended by this description (not so much the reference to > > lawyering, though I'm sure you intended it as an insult, but that you seem to > > think I interpret the bug reports I receive in a lawyer-like fashion). > > It was not meant as an insult. I wanted to tell that the comparisons you > made to countries/institutions and the like do not help resolving our > issue because we do not face the same problems and don't have the same > objectives. That is not, however, what you wrote (and I don't see how one can get from lawyers to comparisons to countries). (And I don't think the message your comment was a response to contained any comparisons to countries.) I certainly agree that trying to model Debian as a sovereign state is futile, for much the reasons you outline. I may have made that mistake a couple of times when I was younger - I seem to recall having made enthusiastic comments along those lines years ago - but not recently, I believe. In fact, whenever I see that sort of argumentation from someone else, I wince. At the same time, I don't think it is useful to avoid all analogues to the institutes of a country. Any such analogue will, of course, have to be justified by the situation at hand. If I notice that Debian, in my opinion, needs an arbitration body that needs to decide on Official Facts and Official Interpretation of some ratified text, I will look at the courts of law of various countries for inspiration on how they might be organized, simply because they are vast reservoirs of experience. Similarly, when our Constitution gives the Secretary constitutional adjudication powers, I feel it is not only possible but *useful* to tag those powers as "judicial" powers (and apply to them judicial standards) - with no intention on my part to impose a governmental structure on the rest of it. > The constitution should really be clear so that interpretation is almost > never needed. That, unfortunately, is not possible. Certainly any ambiguities that have been caused actual trouble should be plugged, either by changing the text or by establishing clear (and respected) precedents, but you can't produce a document that is at the same time clear and unambiguous. Even if you somehow manage to come up with a text of the Constitution that is for all intents and purposes clear and unambiguous, someone will trot out, given sufficient reason, a tenuous misinterpretation to support their cause. Most of the time, that someone will be a loner, and laughing at them will be quite sufficient, but there may come a time that their cause is shared by a significant portion of the developers, or simply few developers with sufficient clout, and they may decide to pretend the misinterpretation actually had any merit[*]. In such a case, you need some mechanism for slapping them down - a constitutional arbitration body, or an Oracle as I have described it in this discussion. [*] I'm sure people on both sides of the recent events might, at least on bad days, claim that this is actually what happened late last year - with the *other* side being the bad guys. A constitutional interpretation, no matter how well the original document was written, will remain unchalleged only while there is no acrimony within the developers. But then again, who needs a constitution when we all agree anyway? (In other words, the supreme rule of writing contracts - assume that the nice guy sitting on the other side of the table get hit by a bus tomorrow and their inheritors will be of the worst possible kind, and write the contract to withstand that catastrophe - applies, mutatis mutandis, to writing the constitutions of non-governmental organisations like Debian. Except that, unlike most NGOs and most contracts, we don't have any practical recourse in Debian's matters to any court of law backed by some sovereign state.) > We should fix the constitution so that we can leave the duty of > interpreting the constitution to the secretary. We just need to make it > clear that the secretary doesn't have to interpret the foundation > documents to handle his secretarial work and that he must apply 3:1 ratio > based on what the GR says (explicit supersession or not) and not on what > he believes it means in practice. I do not think that is a good idea. All interpretation ought to be based on the actual situation, not on rules-lawyering like "it doesn't explicitly say it, therefore it isn't". If you don't trust the Secretary to interpret the facts correctly, then don't empower him to make the decision. Even dropping the supermajority requirements altogether (Ian's option A) would be better. -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Jyväskylä, Finland http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/newblog/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/antti-juhani/
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