Bill Allombert <ballo...@debian.org> writes: > Much less, because there have been other laws proposal that could affect > us and we have never put out a similar statement so nobody should expect > Debian to make one now.
Yes. Debian is organized around producing a free software distribution, not around legal or policy advocacy. It is normal that organizations that are not involved in politics (particularly transnational volunteer organizations like Debian) don't try to comment on legislation in particular jurisdictions. This is not something that I think we should normally do. We should have exceptional clarity about our position and a clear alignment between the legislation and Debian's interests before we consider making a statement. I think it's *possible* that condition applies here, but I'm dubious. I've previously supported Debian making other essentially political statements and was subsequently convinced that I was probably wrong to do so. Given that, if we say anything at all, I would prefer to make as minimal and focused of a statement as possible, staying well within our area of direct expertise and not getting into analysis of the meaning of legislation. While there are people within the Debian Project who are qualified to do that, the *project* is not, and there are other advocacy organizations that do this type of lobbying regularly who are better-positioned to analyze the legislation in detail and provide feedback from a free software perspective. I'm not seconding Bill's proposed ballot option because I don't want to delegate this to the DPL either. I'm currently inclined to either vote only Luca's more limited statement above none of the above, or vote none of the above over all options. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
