On Tue, Jun 13, 2000 at 02:03:03AM +0200, Fabrice Gautier wrote: > On Tue, Jun 13, 2000 at 08:36:54AM +0900, Noka wrote: > > And hope that Debian is wise enough to listen to users > > because users may almost equal to market, customers or > > clients in business field. > Since when do customers or clients in business field have a rigth to > vote? (to follow your analogy) Since when does a business write a document that explicitly promises to its users or the community in general that they'll behave responsibly? > Anyway, a user-vote would be technically very difficult to put in place. Make an alias non-free-user-poll@vote.debian.org. Procmail it so that if you send a "vote" mail, it records (a) your name (b) your email (c) your vote and so that it send a majordomo-esque authentication mail to that email address. Once a reply to the authentication email is sent, make it record that vote as authenticated. Then ensure the email addresses are unique, that there aren't too many from a single host or that have a single MX, or ensure that all the email addresses are subscribed to debian-user, or do something similar for validation against vote stacking. Similar systems have been in place for voting on Big-8 newsgroups since forever. What might be more difficult is working out how to judge the results. If 99% of users demand we keep non-free, do we vote anyway? If 49% of users want non-free and 51% have no use for it at all, is that indicative of a significant number of users wanting non-free, or that a majority don't want it? Similarly, wording the ballot so that it's not biassed towards getting rid of non-free or not may be difficult. But these aren't technical problems. > And anyway your analogy is very bad. Remember Debian is about Free > Software ot market. You can expect RedHat to consider users interests > before their personnal believes. You can expect Debian Developpers to > do the exact reverse: They are doing what they believe in. Some of us believe in the needs of our users. (Actually, I suspect most or all of us do, whether we or they agree that non-free serves those needs or not) Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and working code.'' -- Dave Clark
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