Bruce Perens rejected from license-proliferation committee.

Ian Lance Taylor ian at airs.com
Mon Aug 22 21:14:59 UTC 2005


Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> writes:

> No, I'm saying that the means cannot be judged independently of the
> ends.  People are saying that they want a more democratic process.  If
> the process was more democratic and produced a bad result, people
> would not be happy.  The people calling for a more democratic process
> wouldn't blame a bad result on the democratic process, though.  They
> would say "oh, but you weren't democratic ENOUGH, otherwise you would
> have gotten a good result."
> 
> In other words, the people who are criticizing us are saying that the
> means determine the ends, and if you didn't get good ends, it's
> because your means weren't good enough; not that the wrong means were
> chosen.
> 
> A priori, democracy is held to be good.  This is faith-based reasoning.

Just for the record, this completely misdescribes my complaint.  The
issue I'm complaining about is the lack of democracy and transparency
(both are important) in conjunction with the claim to act for the good
of the community.

Since I consider myself to be part of the community, it irritates me
that the OSI claims to act on my behalf yet has no mechanism for
actually finding out what I want.  In other words, I think that the
OSI, as presently constituted, is presenting itself in a false light.

But, as I said earlier, I gave up trying to win this fight several
years ago.

Ian



More information about the License-discuss mailing list