Roland Mas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
The problem is that the rules (guidelines, actually) for deciding
what we consider free enough to put in Debian, and what we don't,
do not emanate from the users but from our constitution and
social contract.
i'm no populist, but it strikes me no matter how you phrase it, that
an organization dedicated to user freedoms has latent problems if its
basic policy process doesn't emanate from the users.
certainly users of foo schizoid enough to say, "i want to subscribe to
a new overarching viewpoint that not only inconveniences me, but
requires me to proselytize upstream to the happy hackers i depend on,
against their heavily-researched positions that i tend to agree with"
need to be tolerated by other users of foo, but understanding doesn't
require agreement (these concepts being orthogonal).
We are not restricting our users, like your remark seems to imply
we are. We are restricting ourselves.
by restricting yourselves (in your mind, apart from the users) w/
insufficient granularity, you end up in practice restricting the users
anyway, driving them to help each other apart from you, and inducing
their mistrust.
supporting granularity, like supporting plurality, is more work and
less glamorous, so i have only faint hope that debian moves in that
direction.
thi
