Re: Overriding vs Amending vs Position statement
Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org> writes:
> On Sat, May 02, 2009 at 07:10:07AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The Debian project believes that shipping NVidia drivers in main is
>> consistent with the current DFSG and Social Contract.
>> If you think there's any serious danger of that passing with a
>> majority, I would contend that you're essentially arguing there's
>> such a serious disagreement in Debian over this issue that we do not
>> even share the same language, terms, and basis for discussion. I
>> don't see that pessimism supported by any of the previous votes or by
>> the general discussion here.
> Would your statement still apply if you replace "NVidia drivers" with
> "non-free kernel firmware"?
Well, part of the dispute is over the definition of non-free. If one
defines non-free as non-compliant with the DFSG, then such a statement
would be internally contradictory. However, semantics aside, for the
definition of non-free I'm pretty sure you're using (no source
available), I think that's basically the GR we passed for the release of
lenny. So no. :)
> Since I view those as equivalent, and the latter seems far more
> dangerous, I do think the pessimism is warranted.
However, for two releases in a row, the project has wanted to release
with non-source kernel firmware.
I think this gets to the heart of the current conflict: the people who
"lost" the previous two votes would like a 3:1 majority be required to
do the same thing again, since it keeps passing with a 1:1 majority.
It's certainly a reasonable position. (Hopefully we now have a
technological solution to prevent that specific problem from coming up
again, but a similar one will doubtless arise in the future.)
I think the summary of my position is that we need to either:
* Affirm the current governance process in the constitution and
recognize that in the absence of a 3:1 majority one direction or
another, individual developers are going to make possibly-conflicting
decisions about what the DFSG and SC mean and may express those
interpretations via non-binding 1:1 majority position statements, OR
* Amend the constitution to create an officer of the project whose job
it is to determine the canonical meaning of the foundation documents
for all developers.
In other words, we either need to affirm the current arrangement for
"who decides" or we need to change "who decides." Trying to do anything
else with this without addressing the core question of "who decides"
essentially means pretending we all think the foundation documents mean
the same thing, which they clearly don't.
(Well, eliminating the 3:1 majority requirement is a third solution,
basically moving "who decides" to the project via GR with a 1:1
majority, but I think that's a bad solution.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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