10 p.m.
Ludovic Courtès <ludo(a)gnu.org> writes:
>> In my view, being an Assembly member gives the additional
possibility of
>> participating in decision making. That would mean having a voice in the
>> (presumably rare) case where consensus cannot be found and we need to
>> vote, and having an opinion “that counts” in other cases.
>>
>> IMO Assembly members must sign the Social Contract: it’s the way we
>> collectively agree to basic requirements and goals.
>
> I don't like the word "sign", but yes, I agree that being a GNU
> contributor (however we define that term) and endorsing the GNU Social
> Contract would make you an GNU Assembly member.
>
> But again, we might have some trouble defining GNU contributor. For
> example if you look at the maintainer file on fencepost you will now
> see that it lists GNU Radio as unmaintained and various
> packages/maintainers are now marked as "renegade", like most GNOME
> related packages. I assume we still count them as GNU contributors. On
> the other hand the maintainer file on fencepost lists some maintainers
> who haven't actually contributed much besides an empty package (but
> maybe they contributed to others?).
Good points. In the end, I think what makes most sense is the notion of
membership, where one endorses the GNU Social Contract.
“Membership” in the GNU Assembly? Or membership in the … let’s say…
copy-on-write fork of GNU? Is there any difference?
I see this attempt at organizing beyond the structures that the founder
established as a way to improve on the organization of the project. To
me this necessitates endorsement of the GNU Social Contract, at least
for those who want to have their voice heard in decisions that affect
this collaborative effort.
At the same time, the GNU “project” as it is has a number of
contributors who at best don’t care about our vision and don’t have any
motivation to endorse the Social Contract. The original project’s goal
to create a free operating system with many useful programs has been
largely successful, so it seems to me that there is little more
motivation for maintaining even the illusion of a “project”.
I would hope that this notion of “non-endorsing member” will become
moot. Perhaps we should just exclude that notion in fact, since
non-endorsing members are probably going to be rare.
If the requirement to vote is endorsement of the Social Contract, we
will exclude many GNU maintainers who disagree with the necessity for
such a Social Contract. I’m not clear on what “membership” really
entails, but it seems to me that there’s a danger of a circular
definition.
Do we want to tolerate or even invite the dissent of those who disagree
with the Social Contract? (Can we afford to?)
--
Ricardo