On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 10:13:33PM -0700, Brian Nelson wrote: > I recently conducted a poll on debian-user to get some input from users > about the FDL issue. The results are available here: > > http://people.debian.org/~pyro/fdl_poll_results.txt > > And the full mail log is available here: > > http://people.debian.org/~pyro/fdl_poll.mail
I wonder how many of these people have actually read the arguments, and actually thought about their answers; how many could defend their position. My experience is that "polls" and "petitions" encourage people to give their knee-jerk opinion, and rarely give an accurate indication of *informed* opinion--they give people an opportunity to voice one's opinion without any obligation of defending it; an undefended opinion has no value. (Many people's initial reactions to this issue were "that's not so bad, let's just make an exception", who realized how big of a mistake that is after debating the issue for a while.) > I strongly suggest reading the mail log, since many of the full > responses are more interesting than the overall results. I read it, and didn't find anything of interest; only a tiny handful of them had anything beyond single-word answers, and most of those are weak arguments that have been made and debunked many times already. Of course, I'm not making light of user opinions--I'm a user, too! Anyone with an informed opinion who wants to bring it to discussion can do so, on d-project. I just don't believe there's any value in polls like this. If you have a defensible position, replying to a poll won't do it justice. -- Glenn Maynard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
