Re: [gentoo-project] Social Contract clean-up

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 3:06 PM, Daniel Robbins <drobbins@××××××.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 4:39 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I want all our users to be happy.  I want every single one of them to
>> get the distro they want to have.  I want our users to have a distro
>> with no directories with "systemd" in the name.  I want our users to
>> have a distro where every application is well-integrated with systemd.
>> I want our users to not be exposed to packages that may break.
>
>
> There is a serious ethical problem with saying "I care about
> _insert_group_name_here_, but I don't want them to vote." Let's apply this
> same logic to women, or to black people. Does it make sense in that context?

I'm certainly not discriminating based on identity here.  It isn't
unethical for an organization to deny voting to people who aren't
members of that organization, or to have qualifications for
membership.

You act as if Gentoo is doing something egregious here.  In fact, I'm
not aware of any organization that operates in the manner you suggest.
If you were aware of one you'd be citing it instead of arguing in the
abstract.

>
> User representation absolutely needs to exist. When I led the project, it
> was entrusted to me.

Back then I was a user, and I certainly don't remember being given the
opportunity to vote for somebody to tell you what to do.  As far as
I'm aware Funtoo also doesn't have an elected (and paid) user
representative to ensure that you're listening to your user's needs
today.

And that is fine, because just like everybody who uses Gentoo today I
used it of my own free will, and had no obligation to continue using
it if for whatever reason it didn't meet my needs.  I appreciate the
great things you created for the benefit of all, and that you continue
to contribute.  It isn't my place to assert some right to oversee the
work you graciously donate.

More than most distros Gentoo already gives users a lot of empowerment
by giving them meaningful choices.  They don't get to vote for their
favorite service manager, then some committee listens to their input
and picks the final answer for them that they can take or leave.  No,
we actually give them more than one, and they get to make their own
final decision.  Unfortunately we can't always do that for everything.
I can get why those who use a distro that offers so much user
empowerment might naturally seek to empower users even more.  However,
my main concern here is that this can backfire.

I'm genuinely curious as to whether anybody has ever tried to actually
do anything like this, and if so how it went.

-- 
Rich