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Re: Enlightenment (Was: A GNU “social contract”?)


From: Andreas
Subject: Re: Enlightenment (Was: A GNU “social contract”?)
Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2019 12:13:47 +0100

On Thu, 2019-11-07 at 11:12 +0100, Andreas Enge wrote:
> 
> In that sense, I understand the last paragraph of our open letter as
> an
> invitation to put enlightenment into practice:
> "We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide
> about the organization of the project." Overcome our nonage, shape
> the GNU Project!

That would make:

"We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide
about the organization of the project *because* we want to overcome the
inability to use out own understanding without another's guidance."

which is laudable, but that's not what the open letter says. It says:

"We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide
about the organization of the project *[because]* the GNU Project we
want to build is one that everyone can trust to defend their freedom."

This implies the current chief GNUisance cannot be trusted to defend
everyone's [software] freedoms. Disregarding everything else, and given
GNUIsance's track record based solely on defending software freedom, I
find this particular implication very unconvincing, especially since no
further case is presented to show how the undersigned are planning to
address the alleged situation of lack of trust in GNUisance's ability
to defend software freedom.

And, maybe paradoxically, the undersigned are GNU maintainers. As I
understand it this means they have to abide by the license, but are
otherwise free to disregard Free Software philosophy.

This maintainers' lack of accountability, combined with the opportunity
of corruption through meritocracy[1], makes the whole effort this open
letter describes look destabilising and needlessly divisive, since it
can only be agreed with at an emotional level.

To truly implement such fundamental changes, it would perhaps be better
to start drafting a solid charter (including the exact responsibilities
of GNUisance's role in the project), because as things are, the open
letter describes a situation where GNU maintainers who can have a
negative or neutral opinion of software freedom can request the removal
of another maintainer who has a strong and positive attitude regarding
software freedom for opinions outside of GNU. This would obviously be
an absurd and destructive situation.

- Andreas

[1] I wrote an earlier mail about this: "Why GNU cannot afford to be a
meritocracy"



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