Joerg Jaspert writes ("Re: Validity of DFSG #10"):
> But we would be happy to work with / lead / whatever-one-names it with a
> group of volunteers together. Exact details of how that works out are to
> be found, but im sure we can. If there are volunteers for it...I would volunteer. But: We have had problems in the past with a self-selecting group containing an imbalance of views (compared to the rest of the project) trying to take control of these important and politically charged[1] decisions. This has been worked around to an extent by ftpmaster essentially ignoring "conclusions" from debian-legal (which FAOD I think is entirely proper), but the perception from outside the project is confused to say the least. While licensing discussions are for many people a tedious interruption from real work there are also people for whom they are an attractive way to influence the world and advance their ideological[1] causes. (Obviously I'm including myself in that latter category.) So if we are to set up a formal decisionmaking group for licensing questions, we need to be sure that its selection mechanisms are sound, that it is properly representative of the project as a whole and that all of its members are DDs. Perhaps we should have a project-wide election, with hustings and a set of representative licence questions for the candidates to answer ? (Condorcet is a bad voting system for electing representative panels - it tends to result in majority domination; we should use STV or perhaps Shulze STV.) If we did this we'd have to redo the election every few years. Such a panel would arguably also be a more appropriate venue than the TC for deciding what policy should say about cross-suite dependency lines (#681419). IMO we should also establish a new forum for its deliberations to which only members of the panel are able to post. This avoids domination of the discussion by those (like myself...) who have a lot of time to argue about licensing, vis a vis those doing technical work. Ian. [1] I use "political" and "ideological" without criticism. Debian's chief goal - freedom - is a matter of ideology. And because freedom always means escaping from someone's control, it's also a matter of politics. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
