Sam Hartman wrote: > I think phrasing this in terms of justice and rights for keeping governments accountable is likely to get a knee-jerk reaction from a number of people who do not want to think of things that. > It's fairly clear to a number of us that maintaining standards of a private community is a very different problem than maintaining justice for people who have the power to deny life and liberty.
I believe that this is a key point to this discussion. We need to ponder carefully on which point of the scale Debian should place itself. On one hand, Debian isn't a government and shouldn't be subject to the same standards of accountability and due process as someone who has the power to deny life and liberty. On the other hand, Debian isn't either a private house where the owner has the right to decide who gets in and who doesn't without explanations or with "I just don't like you" as an acceptable explanation. Debian is a community that strives to be open, fair and inclusive. That means that we have made a commitment to welcome everybody and not exclude anyone without good reasons. That means that the "we're a private group so we choose whom we want in" argument simply does not belong here. So, while I'd agree that talking about the Magna Charta is probably out of place here, I definitely believe that members of the Debian community are entitled to a fair hearing before being subject to any punitive actions. How that hearing should be conducted, how formal it should be, etc., may be worked out in different ways. Gerardo
