Hi Eduard, On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 08:49:56PM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> > Make no mistake, the quest to have "apolitical" free software is deeply > > political in itself: the process that decides which group can establish > Sorry, by your definition there is no way to escape from political > discussions. You can't escape your work being tangled up in politics. Whether you actively take part is your choice, of course. > No way for Debian to be just a hobby, just a tech oriented > project, because EVERYBODY (yes, even you uncle Joe) must be dragged > into political activities and go the whole nine yards, GOT IT??? At the individual level, if you have the necessary privilege, nothing stops you from ignoring the politics, but you can't really stop the other individuals (and corporations). Debian as an entity absolutely cannot ignore politics, because it keeps intruding on our work. We used to have separate infrastructure outside the United States because the political situation at that time forbade us from exporting crypto- graphic software from the US, and Debian spent a lot of effort to get this changed. The technical work is only a tiny part of what we do as an organization, and I'd even argue that most of the technical work happens outside our organizational structures. Pulling a technical matter before the TC is seen as a heavy-handed approach. Instead, what Debian does as an organization is *enable* the technical work, by taking care of political aspects so individual developers don't have to. Stopping Debian from doing that will not make your tech oriented hobby less political, because it removes a shield and directly exposes you to the politics of what we are doing here. Apart from the "openly" political work, Debian also does community building, and this, too, enables technical work as it pulls in new contributors. Handling conflicts within the community is part of that work, and how we handle conflicts decides who will be future contributors. Taking a hands-off approach here means leaving contributors to deal with conflicts themselves, selecting potential contributors for people who accept that working for Debian includes interpersonal conflict that distracts from tech work. This, again, runs counter to your intention that people should (be able to) focus on tech work. Simon
