Re: Democratic Leadership

[Olaf Buddenhagen]

Hi,

On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 01:03:56PM +0100, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> On 2014-12-02 at 00:51, Olaf Buddenhagen wrote:

[pages upon pages of ramblings about free choice]

You appear to have entirely too much free... time upon your hands :-P

Seriously, I just skimmed over this -- and the vast majority of people
won't bother to do even that. You should seriously work on
brevity/getting to the point...

As a matter of fact, most of us are probably well aware of the fallacies
of "free choice", and why "liberal" political philosophy is actually
very oppressive. However, I feel that most of this really does not apply
to the topic at hand...

For one, you do not account for different *costs* of making choices:
switching software projects is much more feasible than switching
countries.

More importantly, you do not distinguish limited choices from unlimited
ones. There are only so many countries you could live in: you can't
create your own one; you can't fork an existing one, to fix just a
couple of pressing issues. That's not like Free Software projects at
all. (To quote RMS: "A choice of masters is not freedom.")

> So if the GNU project makes a bad choice, you???re not ???free??? of
> leaving it. You stay in it.

Quite some people have left over the years...

> You stay in it because it contains some of the most amazing project
> you can imagine and because all the great hackers working on it are
> doing it here.

That's not coincidence, though. It is because, on the whole, the
("non-democratic") leadership was mostly making good choices. If that
were no longer the case, people can and *will* leave.

(In a large project, it is not feasible of course for a single developer
to maintain a fork, or to create a competing project from scratch.
However, if it's just a single person disagreeing, "democratic"
leadership wouldn't have helped either... If, on the other hand, a great
number of people disagree on important choices, a successful fork is
perfectly possible -- there is plently of precedence for that. GNU
projects not excluded.)

> > Also note that Debian is not actually democratic in any meaningful
> > way: voting is limited to the select group of Debian Developers;
> > while the vast majority of people affected by the project's
> > decisions -- namely the "mere" users -- do not have any say.
> 
> ???meaningful way???: its developers are not exploited nor controlled
> by a Great Chief, by a Guide, a /Guru/, a /Duce/.

Neither are the individuals or companies contributing to GNU or Linux or
any other "non-democratic" Free Software project. They all put in their
efforts of their own accord. They are indeed reasonably free not to --
see above.

> It???s like the difference between a cooperative and a company:
> workers collaboratively decide what they *do*.

Actually, in a cooperative, it's the *stakeholders* who decide. In most
cases, the majority of them are *not* workers employed by the
cooperative; but rather users of the services provided. If Debian was
like a cooperative, the users would have an equal vote, not just the
developers.

But that's not really the topic at hand... Just wanted to point out that
"democratic" is a misleading term here, and comparisions to actual
political systems are indeed seriously flawed.

-antrik-