Michael Meskes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 11:26:26PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> That would make Debian, at most, a republic, not a democracy. > Would you care to elaborate and explain it isn't a democratic republic > then? Debian's delegate system makes it very strongly on the republican side of things, enough so that I think calling it a democracy is misleading. Yes, in theory we can elect a DPL who can then rescind any delegation and appoint someone new, but the levels of indirection involved make that more in the style of the original US Senate. The point that makes it the most democratic is the recourse to GR to *overturn* decisions, but most decisions in the project are not made by vote and shouldn't be. Most decisions are not even made by elected officials, as we only have one of those and most of the job of the DPL is cheerleading, financials, legalities and public relations. And whether it's a democratic republic or some other form of hybrid mostly depends on whether you consider ftp-master to be a delegate position or a somewhat independent check, a question that I expect would only get firmly resolved under circumstances that none of us really want to see. I realize that I'm drawing linguistic distinctions that few people care about, which is why I marked my original message as a pet peeve, but I'd say that Debian is somewhat democratic but not a democracy. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
