General Resolution: Statement Regarding Richard Stallman's FSF Readmission | Hacker News Reader

General Resolution: Statement Regarding Richard Stallman's FSF Readmission

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25 pointsyrcode12 comments

Debian has a really interesting voting process[0].

> 1. Given two options A and B, V(A,B) is the number of voters who prefer option A over option B.

> 2. An option A defeats the default option D by a majority ratio N, if V(A,D) is greater or equal to N * V(D,A) and V(A,D) is strictly greater than V(D,A).

> 3. If a supermajority of S:1 is required for A, its majority ratio is S; otherwise, its majority ratio is 1.

IIUC, the summary of the vote is:

The "No statement" option (7) beat the most popular rebuke FSF/Stallman option (2) by 8 votes (207 - 199) or ~2%.

It's also interesting that the individual ballots are public for such a polarizing issue. Even thought "no statement" won the vote, I wonder how much the public vote itself will divide the community and damage relationships.

[0]: https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-A

> I wonder how much the public vote itself will divide the community and damage relationships.

Participating in a democratic process is an implicit endorsement of it, whatever the final results. It would be very strange for people who have participated in this process to fight after the result. The whole point is to settle an issue.

Now, maybe external actors will use the public votes to harass participants. There's lots of idiots out there. Maybe the full vote results should have been communicated only to the participants.

this was brought up in the discussion before the vote, the argument against it was that there was only a provision for keeping the election secret, but not votes on resolutions.

i did have the impression that an exception to making the votes public would be made, but i just found the actual vote list, so that didn't happen.

>The results of the General Resolution is:

> Option 7 "Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue"

Really, the best possible outcome. Supporting either letter would have divided the Debian community in an angry and useless way.

Indeed. It is not Debian's fight, so not participating in it is the most mature and reasonable option.

Looks like two more votes for option 4 over option 7 would have made a Condorcet cycle at the top, and they'd have had to break out the fun beatpath stuff.

That is not enough to create a cycle. Option 7 would still beat option 4 via option 3 with 8 and via option 2 with 4 votes. Note that there is already a cycle between option 1, 3, and 4. You're right that it doesn't take that many votes to create more cycles and complicate the process.

If option 4 had beat option 7 pairwise but lost transitively by some longer path, isn't that what we mean by the term "cycle"?

Not as far as I know. If an option X beats an option Y, and Y beats option Z, and Z beats option X, you have a cycle. This is the case in the GR for option 1, 3, and 4.

If there are no other options beating X, Y or Z, they all 3 end up in the Schwartz set. We then have to determine which is the weakest defeat in the Schwartz set and remove it, and then determine the Schwartz set again.

Edit: Clearly I was confused, and changing it creates additional cycles.

I'm glad about the outcome, but the number of Debian devs willing to sign known defamatory statements by voting for the anti-Stallman letter is frightening.

The proponent of that particular choice, Langasek, works for Canonical. Stallman had been making critical statements about Ubuntu for a long time ...

This sort of speculative rumour mongering is borderline flamebait and runs afoul of the rules around here.

Langasek has been part of the Debian community for a long time.

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