On Thu, 2019-11-07 at 11:12 +0100, Andreas Enge wrote: > > In that sense, I understand the last paragraph of our open letter as > an > invitation to put enlightenment into practice: > "We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide > about the organization of the project." Overcome our nonage, shape > the GNU Project!
That would make: "We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide about the organization of the project *because* we want to overcome the inability to use out own understanding without another's guidance." which is laudable, but that's not what the open letter says. It says: "We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide about the organization of the project *[because]* the GNU Project we want to build is one that everyone can trust to defend their freedom." This implies the current chief GNUisance cannot be trusted to defend everyone's [software] freedoms. Disregarding everything else, and given GNUIsance's track record based solely on defending software freedom, I find this particular implication very unconvincing, especially since no further case is presented to show how the undersigned are planning to address the alleged situation of lack of trust in GNUisance's ability to defend software freedom. And, maybe paradoxically, the undersigned are GNU maintainers. As I understand it this means they have to abide by the license, but are otherwise free to disregard Free Software philosophy. This maintainers' lack of accountability, combined with the opportunity of corruption through meritocracy[1], makes the whole effort this open letter describes look destabilising and needlessly divisive, since it can only be agreed with at an emotional level. To truly implement such fundamental changes, it would perhaps be better to start drafting a solid charter (including the exact responsibilities of GNUisance's role in the project), because as things are, the open letter describes a situation where GNU maintainers who can have a negative or neutral opinion of software freedom can request the removal of another maintainer who has a strong and positive attitude regarding software freedom for opinions outside of GNU. This would obviously be an absurd and destructive situation. - Andreas [1] I wrote an earlier mail about this: "Why GNU cannot afford to be a meritocracy"
