Marty <[email protected]> writes: > I agree technically but I wonder whether strategic, ethical or social > contract issues were given sufficient weight, or if the constitution > even allows for such considerations. I don't know but this obviously > would include some regard for the wider community, including users.
[...] Hi Marty, I probably shouldn't reply to more systemd discussion, but I do think this has some relevance to the question of how to handle TC decisions more generally, so I'm going to dive into this anyway. I believe this is an example of the pattern that I identified in a previous message. What I'm seeing in your message makes me believe that you are so firmly convinced that systemd is evil, its developers are evil, and it is a negative effect on free software that you are unable to comprehend how someone could disagree with you. The only possibility is that they must have somehow been prevented from taking those issues into account, either by not giving them sufficient weight or because of some provision of our governance structure, or because they were caught "off guard," or because they're part of the corrupt conspiracy. I was one of the Technical Committee members who was involved in this decision. I have, and had, absolutely no affiliation with Red Hat whatsoever (or Ubuntu, for that matter). I took strategic, ethical, and social contract issues fully into account in making my decision. They pointed me towards systemd. Other colleagues drew different conclusions. We're independent human beings who arrive at different conclusions given the same evidence. This is reality. Your model of governance and ethics has to account for this, or it's useless. I have heard all the arguments against systemd. I understand them fully. I was not caught off-guard. I thought about them for months. I believe those arguments range between valid but insufficient given the weight of evidence in the other direction to outright incorrect. I believe the overall characterization of the systemd project and its effect on Debian is factually inaccurate. You are fully entitled to continue to disagree with me. *But I am also fully entitled to continue to disagree with you without being a plant or a conspirator or a liar or a dupe.* If your world view claims that people like me *do not exist*, your world view is, well, wrong. And when you continue to make arguments on the basis that it is somehow impossible to hold the view that I, in fact, hold, you are in effect accusing me of being unethical. Of lying. *This* is where I see the true source of the *ongoing* division in the community. It's not over the technical decision. It's not even over the decision-making process. It's that some people, most (but not all) of whom seem to be opponents of systemd, are so completely confident that they're right and that theirs is the only ethical position possible that they repeatedly accuse anyone who disagrees with them of bad faith. This is horrifically destructive, and extremely demoralizing, and if anything is going to seriously hurt the Debian project as an ongoing collective project, it's this attitude. Reasonable people disgree. We want to continue to work together anyway. We can find ways through a lot of different problems and challenges and disagreements as long as we can unite around that principle. If we can't unite around that principle, almost any disagreement has then potential to tear us apart. The term for this in the broader world is "assume positive intent," and it's one of the most important characteristics for any successful large-scale collaboration. The broader implication of this for the TC is that the TC deals with the most divisive issues, where people have started lining up on sides and the tendency to assume bad faith from the other side has become very strong. Thankfully, very few are as bad as systemd, but some will be quite heated. The TC is in the difficult position of trying to unwind some of that type of conflict as well as making a decision that often won't make everyone happy. It's extremely hard. But one thing that the *rest* of us can do outside of the TC is to hang on very tightly to that principle of assuming positive intent. We're all on the same side. We're all trying to make Debian better. We just disagree how to get there. We've all made a lot of judgement calls in the past, and we've all been right sometimes, and we've all been *wrong* sometimes. We can argue our sides, but at some point we just have to trust our fellow project members and try to make the decision work. That's what makes Debian a collective, collaborative project rather than just a technical assembly of packages. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
