Re: true-democratic association & the Ethics Officer's veto power

[MJ Ray]

Davi Leal <address@hidden> wrote:
> We want to be sure the association will follow the FS philosophy for ever, so 
> I think it is good, and maybe necessary, to have an Ethic Officer with veto 
> power, under the three conditions exposed at 
> http://www.gnuherds.org/Charter.php#Committee

You may think it is good or necessary, but then this association will
not be democratic.  It'll be just another benevolent dictatorship.

I think an alternative way of being more democratic but keeping the
FSF rep's veto would be to clearly state that the "Amendment" section
of the Charter has priority over the "Committee" section.

>   Richard Stallman wrote:
>    "What worries me is the mismatch between the goal of "controlled
>     by its users" and "following the GNU Project's policies".  These
>     two goals seem to be fundamentally at odds in spirit.  That
>     doesn't mean there will be an actual conflict -- but what if
>     there is one?"

If there is a conflict, remove the GNU approval, try to resolve and if
not, then disown, disavow and reboot.  We should not invite people to
support GNU freely *and* try to lock them down.

I'm glad that "following the GNU Project's policies" isn't in the
current draft.  As far as I can tell, those policies are not controlled
democratically either.

> The current proposal keep the association autonomy except that it forces it 
> to 
> follow the Free Software philosophy. I personally think that is not bad. 
> Anyhow, it is a Free Software Association. 

As you may know, I agree with FSF about Free Software programs, but I
have disagreed with them on some other topics.  So, the veto scares me
and I worry that integrity and unabusable operations will mean
hierarchy and secrecy instead of autonomy and cooperation - I felt
that was already appearing in the committee model and the anonymous
posts.  I would be happy to join a Free Software Association but will
not join FSF at present: if GNU Herds are merely a sort of FSF business
memberships, than that's a turn-off and nothing like the ucol
announcement which attracted me.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
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