Hello, On Tue 15 Apr 2025 at 04:45pm +01, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Looking at the responses to Sean and my draft GR proposal last month, > it seems that a several people were upset that we were trying to use > the formal governance mechanism at all. A lot of electrons were > expended trying to find reasons why we shouldn't have done that, or > shouldn't have done it yet. Frankly, I think we would have got > similar responses no matter how we'd gone about it. No amount of > waiting, or cajoling, or attempts at mediation or negotiation, would > have been enough. > > I think this is because there's a substantial contingent in Debian who > "hate politics". They see us "doing politics" and dislike us for it. > They think think Debian can avoid politics (spoiler: it's a project of > thousands of humans, we can't) and therefore they think the drama is > the fault of whoever is complaining. > > In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that we have some teams > that are well-known to be dysfunctional and toxic, but which nothing > is ever done about. Anyone who tries to take them on gets punished, > because taking on toxicity is by definition political. > > I wish we could get *better* at doing politics. If we did it better, > we would have much a nicer environment *and* we would probably spend a > lot less emotional energy on the politics, overall. Right. And note that this is *entirely* orthogonal to the "free software should/should not be apolitical" disagreement that comes up over and over again with the same points of view repeatedly rehearsed. This is just the simple fact that we are a large group of people trying to work together. -- Sean Whitton
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