Re: Democratic Leadership

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

On 2014-12-06 at 04:10, Olaf Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 01:03:56PM +0100, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> [pages upon pages of ramblings about free choice]
>
> 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...

That’s true.

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

I write quick :p (and that’s probably why at the end I didn’t took
enough time to calm down and shrink all that ^^")

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

I was just noticing the cost still exists for software (you gave the
good example of large projects).

>> 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...

There was another if: if you leave, it means you had sufficient reasons,
if you don’t, you didn’t. And a minority left, yet GNU project is not
perfect: that simply means there’s advantages in GNU project that makes
staying in it even with potential disagreements makes sense. I was just
refuting “you can /simply/ go out, democracy is useless”, yet going out
has always a cost (even when, you’re right to notice the point, there’s
unlimited choice), and from the point this cost exists, democracy has an
usage.

>> 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.

Yes of course. I argued about monocracy and relation with
corruption/structure-hijacking in a precedent mail :)

>>> 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.

Yes. The point here was about democracy being about collective choice of
people on themselves, not on more people on another smaller set of
people. I was saying you can’t say “this ‘direct democracy’ is not
democracy” just because the larger set of people doesn’t decide on the
smaller one, so since it regards direct-vote-controlled structures (like
Debian), it wasn’t about GNU, or Linux, or any other non-democratic Free
Software project ;)

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