And the answer is no! Of course. The debian founding documents state that debian was created for the benefit of the user. (The premise of the whole free software movement is the rights of the user: the developers rights are clearly best served by the standard proprietary copyright regime) We are told that any vote by the user would be, in a word, disrespectful of the founding documents!
We are then informed that because earlier a general resolution by some attentive debian package maintainers failed there shall never be another attempt. Of course this earlier attempt occurred before everyone decided to update to Jessie from wheezy, but that makes no difference. How convenient. The fact of the matter is that the technical committee even ruling on this matter was an illegal abuse of process. Such wide ranging changes which are not purely technical in nature Must go to a general resolution to be voted on by all of the debian package maintainers. The abuse of the technical committee, which is stacked with former or current redhat and ubuntu(canonical) employees was intentional. It came just at the time when the correct person was in the chairmanship. What has occurred in debian can be described as a coup. And the trajectory has followed the standard coup path: a beurocratic organ was used to over ride and subvert a formally democratic body, then once such was completed the decision made by a few was declared fiat complete, then harsh critics of the new regime were silenced, and the population informed that they had two choices: conform or get out. You can see the same in Egypt today. Same mechanisms. They use bullets though, rather than bans. Debian, in its founding documents, like the free software movement it once belonged to in fact and in spirit, was created for the users. It is not, by fiat, a doacracy. When it was created the users of debian and some of the programmers who created the "upstream" as it is now called were the debian packagers. Since then a new class that is neither user nor programmer has arising and stuck itself between us, all the while kicking the actually productive free software developers out of debian for social crimes. That is the story, that is what has happened. They have taken our Linux distribution from us. The Frenchman above me is one of that number.
