Thien-Thi Nguyen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
Debian policy _doesn't_ emanate from its user base. We're not Red Hat, or any other commercial entity that has to do that. Debian policy comes from its members. > 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. I think he means we member-drive, not user-driven. What you say may be true, but Debian membership is high enough to have a useful userbase. :-) It's not that we don't care about users, it's that we care more about freeness. Peter
