Re: [rain1 at airmail dot cc] Delete abortion joke

[Torvald Riegel <triegel at redhat dot com>]

On Tue, 2018-05-08 at 23:37 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On May  8, 2018, Torvald Riegel <triegel@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > Look at the numbers we have at the moment.
> 
> Those "numbers" have very little to do with the advertised
> "consensus-building community".

For example, they show that many of our developers spoke out.  This
isn't a 2 vs. 1 argument or anything like that.  People have voiced
their opinion.

We had plenty of discussion, see the number of messages in the thread.
People tried to find common ground, offered compromises (eg, see Carlos'
suggestion of a more thorough discussion of censorship elsewhere in the
manual).

Among the opinions voiced, we have something like 12 to 3 in favor of
removing the "joke" (and I'm counting optimistically on the side of the
3).

So, together, (1) everyone was able to voice their opinion, (2) there
was plenty of debate and looking for consensus, and (3) we have a very
clear majority for one of the options.
That's very much a consensus-based decision process.

> That attitude is even more authoritarian than Richard's.

No, it's not.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/authoritarian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

You did have your say, people listened to your arguments, but they
didn't end up being convinced by your arguments.  You had the same
opportunities to try to convince others as everyone else.  There is no
single person that starts with more power than others.

It's not authoritarian if the majority simply disagrees with you and
doesn't follow your will instead of theirs.  They also don't have power
over you: You're free to participate or not, and you can fork the code
and go build the glibc variant you want together with all those that
were convinced by your arguments.  And so can the majority.

Contrast that with the super powers you have associated with RMS: that's
about a specific person having more power than others.  As described by
him, he would reserve the right to overrule any majority if he thinks
it's important.

> For an individual abusive authority, there's often the possibility of
> defense in numbers.

Please, don't imply there's any abuse unless you have proof.

> But when the abusive authority is also a majority, it's absolute power.
> 
> Democracies usually have fundamental rights and contra-majoritarian
> powers to keep even the power of majorities in check.
> 
> There doesn't seem to be anything like that in our rules, is there?

Do you remember this copyleft thing?

The community is not forcing you to do anything.  And you can't compare
this to government structures BTW, given that that's a completely
different setting (eg, people live in a country and can't just beam
themselves to Mars).

(I hope we don't need to discuss power over trademarks, the official git
repo, etc., here.)

> Like, when objections are unreasonably dismissed by a majority, what
> recourse is there?

Your assumption of what is "unreasonable" differs wildly from what the
majority thinks is unreasonable.  Please see that this is your opinion,
not some objective fact we all agree to.

The problem you have is that the majority does not agree with you.  It's
not forcing you to do anything, and you can't force it to do anything
either.  The question that remains is whether you and the majority can
keep working together.

Working together requires the ability to make progress, even when
opinions are not unanimous.  Otherwise, there is "deadlock", and there's
no community effectivly because it stops producing outcomes.

In our consensus-based process, the majority is used as a "deadlock"
breaker, after we tried our best to build consensus (see (1)-(3) above).
In this case, it's even a vast majority.  If you don't accept that, this
community may not be a good fit for you.

You can of course always propose different deadlock breakers, and see
whether you can convince others.

> The purpose/goal of the project is not set in stone, so if it could be
> changed by a simple majority, or deviated from by a simple majority,
> what recourse would GNU and the original project participants have?

12 to 3 (or sth like that) is not a simple majority, BTW.

So, you do want to give more power to the "original project
participants" than to everyone else?  You're of course free to propose
that, but I wouldn't bet that you can convince enough people to follow
that scheme.