The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: CALL FOR VOTES: First of two votes on social contract

On Jun 5, Bruce Perens wrote
> I would like to see how many of the developers are able to accept the
> "social contract" in its present form. This will tell me how much more
> work it needs, and whether it is necessary for me to weaken the
> free-software provisions in the present contract. We will debate it some
> more after this vote, and THEN I will call for a SECOND vote to ratify it.
> 
> Please read the text below, and then use the WWW form
> http://www.buoy.com/debian/survey to vote. The vote is open from now until
> Midnight Pacific Standard Time on Monday.

While I like the voting system, once more I find the choices presented to me
not expressive enough. Don't take this as critism of the voting system, but
as a realization of its limits.

I agree that a social contract is important; I agree with the intentions
behind the current text, however, upon rereading the text, I think that the
following paragraph should be reformulated in a more positive fashion:
> We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free-software
> community. We will put their interests first, heeding the needs of other
> interests such as commercial software manufacturers only when that is
> important to fulfill our users needs.

Putting myself in the position of a commercial software manufacturer, it
is all too easy to read this as "keep out". One of the complaints I often
see on Usenet about Debian is the lack of supported commercial software
compared to Red Hat or Caldera.

I suggest to replace this paragraph by something like
: We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free-software
: community. We realize that the needs of our (potential) users include
: software and services which the free software community cannot currently
: provide. In order to address those needs, we will cooperate with
: commercial software manufacturers in making their products available on
: Debian systems, and we welcome their input. 

That we resolve conflicts of interest in the best interests of our users and
the free-software community, is a natural consequence of this formulation,
which IMO need not be stated explicitly.

Ray
-- 
J.H.M. Dassen                 | RUMOUR  Believe all you hear. Your world may  
jdassen@wi.LeidenUniv.nl      | not be a better one than the one the blocks   
                              | live in but it'll be a sight more vivid.      
                              |     - The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan  


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