Bruce Perens rejected from license-proliferation committee.

[Ben Tilly]

On 8/21/05, Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
[...]
> It's very short.  You should read it.  I discovered something very
> interesting in it: it doesn't matter who writes the law, as long as
> the law treats everyone equally.  It is when the law treats some
> people unfairly that those people seek influence over law-makers.

And I discovered that our politics differ.  But I already knew that.

And in any case this is neither the time nor the place to explore
those differences.

> Do you feel treated unfairly?  Does OSI fail to balance your interests
> and concerns with those of others?  Have we made mistakes that we
> didn't rectify?  Do we reflect a bias against the range of opinions
> you feel you would represent if you were on the committee?
> 
> Rather than judging the process, you should judge the result.  Since
> there are no results yet, you have nothing to say anything about.

And here is where we disagree strongly.

The attitude that you would have us accept is half of a common
catch-22.  When there are no results we are all told that we should
not complain about what has not happened.  When the results are
visible to all, we're told that if we had issues they should have been
brought up before decisions were made.

Please note that I am not arguing that you or any other group of
people are intending to do this.  I am merely pointing out that this
is a common pattern that we've all seen, and therefore many will
populate an absence of results with their fears.  There is no perfect
solution to this problem, but the best two that I know of are to make
the decision making process as tranparent as possible, and to make
some results visible so that people have something concrete to judge
from.

Among the *worst* possible solutions is to tell people who already
distrust the process that they know nothing and should trust what they
are ignorant of.  Which is how that last paragraph comes off.

Cheers,
Ben