DPL Campaign Questions 007
From the other candidates I'd like to know their opinion and plans (if there are any) about license/copyright requirements in Debian.
I believe that intellectual property laws are wrong and should be abolished, so I am not particularly in favor of giving copyrights any more respect than necessary. However, I do not think that Debian is the place to undermine copyright, and that we should attempt to maintain standards which not only protect people from legal liability, but are also in the best interests of our developers and users.
I do not know what level of nitpicking best serves our developers and users. A GR seems like an interesting way of determining at part of that.
What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users?
I do not have one. While I do acknowledge that the number of users does affect us in terms of potential contributor base, and scaling issues (including bug reporting), I do not think that the exact number is important at all to what we do.
Also I would hope that whichever DPL is elected chooses to focus on practical matters rather than academic exercises.
I think that one of issues we have is that there is alot of work to be done by some teams, some of them even regularaly mail that they need more members, but they seem to have a hard time keeping the numbers up, burning the other team members out.
What are your ideas to make sure those teams keep running?
- Diffusion of power throughout the rest of the project
- Delegation of people who do not seek to be core team members if they have the time, are willing, and would make good additions.
Note that I do not think it appropriate either for core teams to choose their own members or to reserve the privilege of demanding that a new person be able to work with them in a certain way. An ideal team member should be able to work with anyone. If the existing delegates are unable to work with new people, perhaps they are not ideal team members.
During the discussions that started after the GR, I suggested that the GR proposer should have more control about the options put to the vote. In particular, it would be useful if he can refuse an option that would disequilibrate the voting system. That would make him responsible for the success of the GR: discarding a popular option is taking the risk that the whole GR is refused and the option is accepted as a separate GR, which is the kind of public failure that I expect that people will avoid.
I do not think GR proposers should have any special control over general resolutions beyond what is Constitutionally granted at present. In fact, I would prefer if people did not try to propose multiple options or strategically craft ballots for any purpose. To me, the only honest method is to propose the outcome one genuinely wants to win, and let our strange and special brand of parliamentary procedure take care of the rest.
As for the supermajority issue, I am not a huge fan of political word games. Debian distributes non-free software. We have a non-free section within our normal infrastructure, and while it is segregated and does not receive quite the same love that main does, it is still very much part of what we work on and distribute from our official infrastructure. So there is no amount of word lawyering, cognitive dissonance, or NM indoctrination that can make me believe that it is an honest statement to say that non-free is not part of Debian.
Likewise I do not believe in redefining success or the meanings of Foundation Documents. I do not think that we should allow ourselves to pass any kind of magical resolution that contravenes the DFSG or Social Contract without actually modifying them. That seems utterly absurd to me, and I have seen what has become of the United States government.