Amendment to GR on GFDL, and the changes to the Social Con..

Thomas Bushnell BSG · External Since: Nov 12, 2004 Posts: 727

JÃ©rÃ´me Marant writes:

> For instance, how does shipping Emacs with verbatim essays from RMS, the GNU
> Manifesto, and any other stuffs like that makes it non-free? Will removing
> them make Debian more free? I doubt anyone is going to convince me of this,
> despite the interpretation of the SC.

Why do you ask questions of this sort, when you immediately follow
them up with "oh, and by the way, nothing you say will convince me of
anything other than what I already believe."

Thomas

Thomas Bushnell BSG · External Since: Nov 12, 2004 Posts: 727

Nick Phillips writes:

> Certainly looks like you think that there is some absolute way to
> determine that the license is not DFSG-compliant to me. If there
> isn't, then the "if" in the first part of your sentence is never
> satisfied, and the rest is completely hypothetical.

Wrong. Stating a hypothetical does not imply that I have some
"absolute way" to determine whether the antecedent is satisfied.

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Nick Phillips · External Since: Jan 13, 2005 Posts: 30

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:19:28AM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 03:21:57PM +1300, Nick Phillips wrote:
> > The vote is not a means of rescinding the DFSG or SC, nor even of
> > contradicting them. It is the *only* means we have of determining
> > whether something is in compliance with them. If a majority say that
> > that is the case, then for our purposes, it is so.
>
> This is silly. It seems like the constitution effectively says "if the
> resolution passes it required a simple majority; if it failed, it needed 3:1".

On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. If it makes part of the
constitution look silly or pointless to you, then there are at least
two other possible sources of that silliness.

> If you take these "interpretive" GRs as not requiring 3:1, then you can
> bypass the 3:1 requirement entirely merely by phrasing your changes as
> an "interpretion", and you can phrase anything at all as an "interpretion".

I actually don't think that's the case. But let's assume that it
is. The fact that you can get around the 3:1 requirement by wording
your GR appropriately merely shows the 3:1 requirement (or its
wording) to have been inadequately thought through -- it certainly
doesn't magically extend it (a particularly bad idea if it seems like
it might not have been adequately thought through in the first place).

Cheers,

Nick

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Jérôme_Marant · External Since: Nov 30, 2004 Posts: 75

Thomas Bushnell BSG writes:

> JÃ©rÃ´me Marant writes:
>
>> For instance, how does shipping Emacs with verbatim essays from RMS, the GNU
>> Manifesto, and any other stuffs like that makes it non-free? Will removing
>> them make Debian more free? I doubt anyone is going to convince me of this,
>> despite the interpretation of the SC.
>
> Why do you ask questions of this sort, when you immediately follow
> them up with "oh, and by the way, nothing you say will convince me of
> anything other than what I already believe."

Doesn't it sound like a challenge? I'm still listening.

--
JÃ©rÃ´me Marant

Jérôme_Marant · External Since: Nov 30, 2004 Posts: 75

Thomas Bushnell BSG writes:

> JÃ©rÃ´me Marant writes:
>
>> Would you please tell me how necessary it is to modify RMS essays, the
>> GNU Manifesto, and so on, and how removing them from Emacs will make
>> Debian more free? I'm afraid it sounds ideological.
>
> Actually, I'd rather we could keep them.

Ah! So, after all, not everything would be either black or white?

> And we do have an ideology, right there in the first sentence of the
> Social Contract.

I've never wanted to consider it that way, because I can promote it
without any political arguments, at least.

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JÃ©rÃ´me Marant

Glenn Maynard · External Since: May 22, 2005 Posts: 143

On Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 10:07:23AM +1300, Nick Phillips wrote:
> On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. If it makes part of the
> constitution look silly or pointless to you, then there are at least
> two other possible sources of that silliness.

I think this circling argument is silly, not the constitution.

> > If you take these "interpretive" GRs as not requiring 3:1, then you can
> > bypass the 3:1 requirement entirely merely by phrasing your changes as
> > an "interpretion", and you can phrase anything at all as an "interpretion".
>
> I actually don't think that's the case. But let's assume that it
> is. The fact that you can get around the 3:1 requirement by wording
> your GR appropriately merely shows the 3:1 requirement (or its
> wording) to have been inadequately thought through -- it certainly
> doesn't magically extend it (a particularly bad idea if it seems like
> it might not have been adequately thought through in the first place).

This "it's only an interpretation! not 3:1!" is merely word-game rules-
lawyering to try to create a loophole in the constitution. Those loopholes
can always be created, if everyone is allowed their own interpretation of
the rules; that's not an indication of lack of forethought.

Fortunately, as is typically the case, everyone is not allowed their own
interpretation of the rules.

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Glenn Maynard

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Raul Miller · External Since: May 06, 2005 Posts: 37

On 2/10/06, Anthony Towns wrote:
> I didn't say anything about the ballot options being ignored -- I said the
> constitution doesn't say anything about ignoring foundation documents --
> ie the social contract or the DFSG. We're actually doing that right now
> in a sense, by continuing to leave bugs like #199810 unfixed.

So stick it in non-free for unstable, until the issue gets resolved.

--
Raul

Raul Miller · External Since: May 06, 2005 Posts: 37

On 2/11/06, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 03:21:57PM +1300, Nick Phillips wrote:
> > The vote is not a means of rescinding the DFSG or SC, nor even of
> > contradicting them. It is the *only* means we have of determining
> > whether something is in compliance with them. If a majority say that
> > that is the case, then for our purposes, it is so.
>
> This is silly. It seems like the constitution effectively says "if the
> resolution passes it required a simple majority; if it failed, it needed 3:1".

The only silliness is the verb tenses. Once some concept passes
supermajority it doesn't need to pass again, because it has already
passed.

The real problem here is that the option in question uses poor grammar.

For that reason alone, I think this option would be bad for the project.
It's already spawning arguments because people think they agree
with the option, but it's not clear what agreement with the option means.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, our resolution mechanism for this kind of
problem involves voting. Personally: I am reasonably confident that most
of the developers will vote against something like this: where the grammar
of the proposal is so poor that it spawns grammar based arguments about
what it would mean if it were accepted -- before it's even voted on.

--
Raul

Glenn Maynard · External Since: May 22, 2005 Posts: 143

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 07:21:22PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > This is silly. It seems like the constitution effectively says "if the
> > resolution passes it required a simple majority; if it failed, it needed 3:1".
>
> The only silliness is the verb tenses. Once some concept passes
> supermajority it doesn't need to pass again, because it has already
> passed.

To phrase it differently, it seems like the vote says "the DFSG means this",
and the notion is that if the vote passes, then it did, in fact, mean that;
since nothing changed, no supermajority was required. If it failed, then
the DFSG did not mean that, and making it say what the option claimed
would have been a change to the DFSG, and require a supermajority. That's
just what this argument seems to have turned into.

In reality, even if it passes, it's changing the DFSG by overlaying an
enforced interpretation.

I suppose this was an underlying glitch with GR2004-003: its changes
were "editorial" to you if you agreed with them beforehand, but not to the
people who didn't. That should be a strong hint to anyone who doesn't
want their GR to be attacked by the minority for all time: avoid calling
changes "editorial" or "interpretive". Even if, to you, they really are,
they won't be to the people who disagree. That doesn't mean the GR text
can't say things like "this is believed to already be the interpretation
held by most DD's", if that's what the proposer and seconders actually
believe, but recognize that you *are* changing the DFSG for those who don't.

(The above isn't intended to spawn another "editorial" argument, but rather
to give the proposer of this option another reason to think about rewording
it: whether editorial or not, the labelling of GR2004-003 as such *has*
caused such attacks. If you want invariant sections and the rest of the
problems to be considered free, say so.)

--
Glenn Maynard

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Simon Richter · External Since: Nov 30, 2004 Posts: 9

Hi,

Raul Miller schrieb:

>>This is silly. It seems like the constitution effectively says "if the
>>resolution passes it required a simple majority; if it failed, it needed 3:1".

> The only silliness is the verb tenses. Once some concept passes
> supermajority it doesn't need to pass again, because it has already
> passed.

By what rule?

The problem case is where the option has majority, but fails
supermajority. It could then be argued that since it has majority, it
constitutes proof that there should never have been a supermajority
requirement and thus the simple majority suffices, or it could be argued
that it failed supermajority, hence modifies a foundation document,
hence requires supermajority. And it *will* be argued, no doubt.

Simon

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Raul Miller · External Since: May 06, 2005 Posts: 37

On 2/10/06, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 11:37:59AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > And, likewise, you can't argue that the secretary must treat an option
> > as accepted when preparing the ballot. Treating controversial
> > general resolution proposals as if they'd already won the vote before
> > the vote begins would be the very abuse of power you're alluding to.
>
> So by this reasoning, is the original GR proposal not "controversial",
> whereas the other two amendments are? What's the key difference, if it
> isn't that the Project Secretary thinks one is correct and the others are
> not?

Rather, the controversial elements of that option does not conflict with
our historical interpretations of the DFSG.

--
Raul

Raul Miller · External Since: May 06, 2005 Posts: 37

On 2/11/06, Simon Richter wrote:
> The problem case is where the option has majority, but fails
> supermajority.

Another problem case is where we pass a GR that expresses
some judgement about past events.

For example, imagine a GR that says "we have never received any spam".

If that passes, what would it mean? Would it mean that the things
we received which we thought were span are not in fact spam?
Would it mean that the people who received spam are not part of the
"we" in question? Would it mean that the spam was inflicted on
us, rather than received by us?

Fundamentally, a GR is a proposal which we accept. It can only
change the future. We can't change the past, and we should not
pretend that we will try.

We should not be trying to hide past mistakes, even when we really
think that they are mistakes.

> It could then be argued that since it has majority, it
> constitutes proof that there should never have been a supermajority
> requirement and thus the simple majority suffices, or it could be argued
> that it failed supermajority, hence modifies a foundation document,
> hence requires supermajority. And it *will* be argued, no doubt.

Please notice that you used the phrase "should never have been".

If we avoid trying to claim that we can change the past, I think the
first part of the above becomes:

It could be argued that if <<an option receives a majority of the votes
preferring it to all option>> then <<a supermajority requirement for
that option was a mistake>>.

--
Raul

Jérôme_Marant · External Since: Nov 30, 2004 Posts: 75

Anthony Towns writes:

> On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 01:23:03PM +0100, J??r??me Marant wrote:
>> For instance, how does shipping Emacs with verbatim essays from RMS, the GNU
>> Manifesto, and any other stuffs like that makes it non-free? Will removing
>> them make Debian more free? I doubt anyone is going to convince me of this,
>> despite the interpretation of the SC.
>
> Shipping those verbatim essays wouldn't be a major problem, IMO;
> adding a loophole to ship _any_ verbatim essay would be -- we're about
> free software, so while we might want to make an exception for verbatim
> essays that happen to be important to that goal in an historical sense,
> there's no benefit to us of having an exception so large that we start
> distributing verbatim essays on anything and everything.

I'd prefer that we consider every case separately instead of blindly trying
to apply rules to everything.

Those essays deal with free software and are moeover very small files
within the huge Emacs beast.
It could be different if they were not dealing with free software and
were about 50% of the Emacs tarball.

> If we /were/ to have such a limited exception, we'd also want it to be
> one we could change our minds on. If we distribute "funding free software"
> as a useful text today, we might change our minds in a decade and decide
> that it isn't actually all that relevant, and isn't even an important
> document in the history of free software, and want to remove it.

I think it would be sane to have exceptions.

> Which is fine if it's a separate document we made an exception for, but if
> it's an irremovable part of our compiler manual, we're stuck. And worse,
> we've just spent ten years encouraging people to provide improvements
> to that compile manual, so if we want to revert to an earlier version
> that didn't have that text, we've also lost all those changes.
>
> In any event, if we were to make an exception for documents that were
> important to free software, hiding them away in the emacs package -- or
> for that matter, in the gcc info page -- is a really daft way of doing it.

I agree that it makes sense to be able to freely modify documentation because
modifying programs often means changing their documentation accordingly.

--
JÃ©rÃ´me Marant

Daniel Ruoso · External Since: May 27, 2004 Posts: 45

Em Qui, 2006-02-09 às 21:18 -0500, Christopher Martin escreveu:
> To impose the 3:1 requirement requires, beforehand, a judgment concerning
> the DFSG.

And so to remove it... If it's a judgement for one side, it's a
judgement for the other...

> Since no one has found a Secretarial basis for that power, it
> follows that to arbitrarily impose 3:1 supermajorities is not proper.

Ok, let me give you some "Secretarial basis":

0) The formal documentations in Debian usually are raised from the
common practice.
a) The Debian Policy is built only using common practices.
b) The DFSG was build after knowing wich licenses Debian consider as
free.
So, on doubt with "written down" documents, you can revisit its origins
and the common practice that raised it.

1) No license (even before the DFSG exists) with this type of
restriction was accepted as free (Please, GPL 2c has absolutely nothing
to do with invariant sections).

2) This way, the proposed amendment open the way for a new type of
restriction, which was never accepted as free, and so causes a implicit
change to DFSG3.

> That the 3:1 bit is mentioned in the constitution is quite irrelevant.

Are you sure? I just explained it does changes DFSG3, and therefore, it
should *as the constitution says* require a 3:1 majority. The
constitution would be violated if manoj didn't apply that.

daniel

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