* Andrew Suffield ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 11:40:21PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > > Further generalisation: > > > > Don't do anything to us, just because of what we are. > > > > That has the benefit of being non-sexist and fitting most (all?) > > discrimination. > > It's entirely unworkable, however. At some point you have to draw the > line - Debian is founded upon discrimination against non-free things > and against broken code, and by extension, their creators and > users. The NM process is founded upon discrimination against the > stupid and the useless. The US is founded upon discrimination against > the poor. Etcetera.
There is a major difference between discrimination based on sex/gender/sexuality/religion/race/etc/etc/etc and discrimination on quality of code/non-free licenses/etc/etc/etc - the first set tend to be inherent to the person being discriminated against, while the second set can be changed. When we discriminate against poor code, we are not saying ``You are beneath us, go away'', we are saying ``This needs fixed - go away and make it not suck''. The line we draw, therefore, is at the point where things change from being implicit and unchangeable, to explicit and changeable. cheers, iain -- "If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -- St. Augustine #rm -rf / http://www.geeksoc.org/
