Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board
vote.debian.org
vote.debian.org
They proposed 8 options. 2 directly called for resignations at FSF, 2 directly supported RMS, one said to stop working with FSF, one said to call for governance improvements at FSF, one was no comment, and one was discuss further.
The two options in support of RMS were not majority held opinions, and were held by ~1/6-1/3 of voters.
No comment beat "call for the removal of RMS" by only 8 votes.
For me, the takeaway here is that while Debian will issue no comment, 2/3+ of voters in Debian supported calling for RMSs removal. It's clear which way the tide is moving, even if Debian says nothing.
Source data: https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_rms/results.txt
Edit: My 2/3+ estimate is a napkin math overestimate, and the number is probably closer to the 50-60% other comments have suggested below.
How did you come to that number?
Option 2 137 168 165 239 227 199 222
222 voted for option 2 over "we should talk about this further" (default position), which is ~53% (222/420).
FWIW, some people didn’t want to vote because the results would be publicly with names.
So the result of a secret vote might have been different.
this may change in the future if enough people find that (optionally) private votes on resolutions are a good idea.
edit: I found those, so it's not that weird, but not very common: Init systems https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002 ; Delaying Lenny https://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003 ; Change to membership procedures https://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_002
They agreed on their voting system in advance exactly to handle cases where the vote might be contentious.
Both of those feel like possibilities, but probably not in any significant number. In absence of evidence to the contrary, I'd say it's reasonable to look at the results of a vote as evidence of how people actually feel.
Edit: Vote numbers seem consistent with other votes in Debian's history, so it does not appear that a large number of people elected not to vote.
It looks like it would need a General Resolution to allow secret voting for future General Resolutions.
The community agreed on no comment, full stop.
A significant preference was also shown for removal over reinstatement.
The vote totals seem in line with historical votes.
If you want to know what people really think without the possibile influence of preference falsification, it needs to be an anonymous poll.
Which is exactly why we not only allow, but actually enforce it in elections. If your vote could have a strong impact on e.g. your future employment, you wouldn't be free to vote for what you think is best, you'd be compelled to vote for what you think is perceived best.
I'd also point out that secret ballot is not universal in the US. Certainly the votes of elected officials are not secret. But neither are open votes at, say, a town hall meeting.
I'm not suggesting they'd have to do that, I'm saying that there's a very good reason why we usually do that. As organizations become more and more political, I expect that to hit harder and for more of them to adopt secret voting.
> Certainly the votes of elected officials are not secret.
And I find that reasonable. You want to know whether the person you voted for actually does what they said. In Germany, parliament votes are public, but important votes are secret.
For the less important votes, they'll just ask for raised hands and note who won, but not who voted in what way (we now have TV channels film the votes and then use interns to determine who voted what).
For important votes, they're done secretly: you can tell who voted, but not what they voted for. There's no way to hold them accountable, the system is working as intended.
I do believe I have a very plausible hypothesis, though, and I find it sufficiently plausible that I'm going to reserve judgement on the true beliefs of people until we see that anonymous poll.
https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/59/4/568/19401...
>regression analysis shows that social forces appear to have a greater effect on vote choices among people who doubt the formal secrecy of the ballot.
It's only clear that the way this is measured is heavily biased: 4 options out of 8 are against current FSF/RMS' statu quo. Only 2 are for supporting the statu quo. And 1 is for indifference, and the last one for more discussion needed.
If you overcharge the negative choices, it's kind of given most of the answers will fall in them. Survey design 101.
For reference:
- Option 1 "Call for the FSF board removal, as in rms-open-letter.github.io"
- Option 2 "Call for Stallman's resignation from all FSF bodies"
- Option 3 "Discourage collaboration with the FSF while Stallman is in a leading position"
- Option 4 "Call on the FSF to further its governance processes"
- Option 5 "Support Stallman's reinstatement, as in rms-support-letter.github.io"
- Option 6 "Denounce the witch-hunt against RMS and the FSF"
- Option 7 "Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue"
- Option 8 "Further Discussion"
That's not how it works. The voters are asked to rank all options according to their preference, and a winner is chosen according to an extended Condorcet criterion. Adding similar options doesn't affect the outcome.
Fewer people being willing to propose a pro-RMS option is an indication of which way the tide is moving, even if you still want to argue about why this might be the case.
If there are several variations of anti-RMS proposals, it suggests that enough people care about the specifics of how the rebuke is worded, etc., but that generally there is enthusiasm about an anti-RMS stance.
If there are fewer pro-RMS proposals, then either they were proposed by people who don't support that option, but are putting it forward because they think it should exist as an option (as you suggest), or because there are fewer people who are enthusiastic enough to care about the minutia of how a support message is to be worded. Either way, that seems to me like less enthusiasm around an anti-RMS proposal.
similar proposals can also be merged, and only options that make sense are being sponsored. and they are sponsored also by people who oppose that option because those people believe that the options should be balanced.
the existing options list all sensible outcomes. i can't think of any other pro- or anti-RMS option that would even make sense.
based on that i can't see how you want to extract any data on popularity
I define "support" as preferring an option over "Further Discussion".
According to [0], there were 420 unique voters. Using 420 as the denominator, and collumn 8 [1] as the numerator, we get the following approval voting results:
1) Call for the FSF board removal, as in rms-open-letter.github.io - 203/420 = 48%
2) Call for Stallman's resignation from all FSF bodies - 222/42 = 53%
3) Discourage collaboration with the FSF while Stallman is in a leading position - 19/420 - 52%
4) Call on the FSF to further its governance processes - 221/42 = 53%
5) Support Stallman's reinstatement, as in rms-support-letter.github.io - 52/420 = 12%
6) Denounce the witch-hunt against RMS and the FSF - 84/420 = 20%
7) Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue - 277/420 = 65%
8) Further Discussion - N/A
It does not look like individual votes have been released yet. If they were, I would like to see how accurate my assumption that no one "approves" of both his presence and absence from the board. The sum of approval for both 1 and 5 is 255 = 61%, so it seems like most of the no statement voters actively disprove of a statement in either direction (instead of simply preferring no statement)
So it might be more correct to say ~3/5s?
2/3+ is overestimate.
About 52% (228/439) preferred one option from 1-4 (anti-RMS) better than neutral options (7-8).
If we ignore winning option 7, then 63% preferred 1-4 to default option 8, while 20% preferred 5-6 (pro-RMS) to option 8.
You don't even have raw vote counts. You have that weird floating relative representation going on, and no formula is given for the totals, or I'm not aware the procedures are that line that out. Example:
2 dimensional matrix Value at (x, y) coordinates should be read as option X received <value> more votes than option Y. The diagonal is blank since it degenerates in this representation.
Row 1 column 2 would assert that option 1 beat option 2 by 113 votes.
Row 2, column 1 however asserts the opposite, that option 2 beat option 1 by 137. This is reading is articulated explicitly in those results.
I see no way that isn't an indication of contradiction unless their tallying method is so bloody exotic I can't even imagine. Nor can I find the where they define their dividend for the majority calculation, but I'm assuming there is a tally of nay/abstain votes somewhere?
What am I missing?
I agree that it would be nice to include the total number of ballots in the final results, but that isn't really relevant to the results.
Each voter submits a ranked choice vote ballot. The table indicates that 113 ballots prefer option 1 over option 2, whicl 137 ballot prefer option 2 over option 1.
The majority calculation is a bit weird. All Debian votes include default option, in this case that is option 8, "Further Discussion". Preferring an option over the default is seen as a general "approval" vote, while prefering the default is considered "disapproval". The "majority" votes looks at the ratio between approval and disapproval. For instance, option 1 had 203 votes to apporove and 186 votes to disaprove, giving it a ratio of 203/186 = 1.09
Voters are not required to vote on all options. Excluding private votes, they release every individual vote once voting is closed, so you can see how many abstensions an indidual option received; but it appears that this has not been released yet.
So there is no general 'nay' vote on a proposal except to vote it at a lower rank than the default option? I think I get it now.
I'm actually kind of glad most people don't want to make any statement at all. It isn't really something tht should matter. Beyond my vocal opposition to lending any credibility to the original smear with regards to RMS, I'm kind of in the camp we should all just move on. Most of FSF's insiders that have a problem with him have more than enough points actually relevant to his missing opportunities to make a worthwhile push at ousting him without relying on controversy and lies, but they'd also have to defend it from an equal playing field then. LLVM, GPL issues, etc... Though even looking into the LLVM controversy, I can still see the wisdom in not accepting it and keeping GCC monolithic after having come across a few oldtimers who were there back when proprietary everything was the norm.
If someone is to be dismissed, let it be on technical merits. Not some tabloid smear.
113 people preferred option 1 over option 2
137 [different] people preferred option 2 over option 1
and presumably the balance of the 420 didn't express a preference. Or at least that's how I read it.
I'm glad to see that Debian isn't caving to the ignorant masses here. The FSF under RMS's leadership has done more for computing freedom than any other organization.
So what if RMS is outspoken about his beliefs? That's exactly the forthright attitude that enabled him to succeed in promoting the GPL so widely. We should all be very glad of this, and not condemn the man just because a few whiners can't deal with someone disagreeing with them.
Being "intolerant to intolerance" is a fairly well accepted idea in societies that value personal freedoms.
He'd also have been disgusted by being used in a propagandistic manner.
It still looks to me that in this case, it's the people calling RMS intolerant that are the intolerant ones. On the contrary, I think RMS actually tolerates a whole lot. He clearly has different views than others on a variety of topics, yet he doesn't let it affect his technical decisions. He's been attacked viciously in the media, but he's tolerated it and is coming back to the FSF. An intolerant person would disappear. Consider all the people on the board of the FSF with opposite political views than his, that he tolerates on a day-to-day basis. An "intolerant homophobe/transphobe" would not tolerate having homosexuals/transexuals on the board, for instance.
Yes. RMS argued for gender-neutral pronouns since more than twenty years ago. Just because it is a different set of neutral pronouns than is popular today, some people mark him transphobic. That is absurd.
Unfortunately, the more tolerant attitude of just agreeing to disagree seems to have gone out of fashion. Now the preferred option is to destroy a person's entire career and slander their reputation with deliberate misinterpretations of what they've said and done.
It's significantly more detailed and complex than "allegedly defending Epstein".
Here's the letter supporting RMS: https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
Now I know how it happens. Some people do something strange, then their number increases, they are very vocal, they're 100% sure what they do is right, they're very emotional about it, and at a certain point it seems like they are the majority. They do certain things like revolutions, usually with a bad result, and you can't do anything, you can just watch it powerlessly and hope it doesn't end badly this time.
If RMS accepts his cancellation, he basically caves to wrongful accusations. If he stays, we can't move forward and get work done because of the drama and all the viable reasons why he shouldn't be a central, public FSF spokesperson anymore.
Plus, everyone really just wants to see the FSF fail anyway, for some reason.
The FSF sadly functions as a cult of personality for RMS at this point. I do not believe either of them are doing anything to help the cause of FOSS at this point.
When multiple options are in the Schwartz set, the weakest defeats are removed until only 1 option is left in the Schwartz set. I think it only draws the graph after there is only 1 option left. But that didn't happen in this vote.
I was kinda confused by the complexity of the results, but if it is about ranks, it all makes sense now :-)
Either remove him according to the rules of the code of conduct, or leave him be. That's what COCs are for.
If you're not happy with the COC, push for changes.