Re: Results of the Lenny release GR
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 01:45:04PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> > As I said in a separate mail, the developers just discredited this line of
> > reasoning by ranking option 2 above option 4.
>
> I disagree completely.
>
> The fact that more people preferred 2 to 4 in this vote does not change
> the fact that the release team is currently empowered to interpret the
> DFSG and SC in their own work. That's what the constitution currently
> says.
You mean what it says, or ...
> I understand that you disagree with this
> interpretation of the constitution,
... your interpretation of what it says?
> Attempting to
> read a project position about the interpretation of the constitution into
> this vote is stretching its implications far beyond what is supportable,
> given that the text of the options didn't address constitutional
> interpretation at all.
No, but it's very clear about developers preferring the option that doesn't
gives this power to the RT over the option that does.
> (Without a 3:1 majority, such a position statement
> would be non-binding anyway,
Interesting to see 3:1 come back. One of the most annoying things about
super-majority requirements is that they appear and disappear depending on
the position one is holding. That's why I would very much like to get rid
of them.
So I take it you didn't agree with Manoj's decision to set super-majority
requirements in the ballot?
> It doesn't
> provide any clarity at all, except that the project wants us to not spend
> time worrying about the licensing of firmware.
Results are clear for me. You'll notice that I'm not complaining about
firmware right now. But the same goes both ways: people should accept the
results when it comes to non-firmware.
> The winning option in the
> vote says nothing one way or the other about the non-firmware licensing
> issues, which means that we're in the same position that we were in before
> the GR began.
Technically yes, but politically the situation is much different. The
developers had a number of options that explicitly granted more exceptions,
and they preferred the one that didn't. This tells us something about what
the majority of us wants, and you shouldn't neglect it.
Of course, you can object that it wasn't an explicit assertion, etc, but
from general consensus to explicit assertion there's only one small step.
Keep that in mind.
> This is one of the reasons why the vote was flawed;
Again, if the vote was flawed (I don't think it was, but if the Secretary
considers it flawed), the right thing would be to cancel it.
--
Robert Millan
The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."
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