Governance and responsibility

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 06:07:19PM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> How about this: *you* tell *me* what would be acceptable as a metric
> of the community's trust in us as gatekeepers and spokespeople.  Stick
> do something behaviorally measurable and possible, please; requests to
> display some sort of invisible pink unicorn will go to /dev/null.
> Within that constraint, I have every confidence that OSI will peg the
> meter whatever you pick.

Bluntly: I will respect the OSI when Eric Raymond is unable to speak on 
their behalf.

Rationale:

Eric Raymond is an utter fucking loon who has no rationale for being 
able to speak on behalf of the community as a whole. His rational 
arguemnt is based upon the following projects:

Fetchmail: Generally regarded as a piece of software that loses your 
mail.

CML2: Something that was rejected by the software community he submitted 
it to.

Ncurses: Something he no longer claims as his own (based on 
http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html)

Eric has (8 years ago) declared that he was willing to make Ncurses 
non-free[1]. I have no reason whatsoever to believe that he is an active 
participant in this community, or even someone who has beliefs inline 
with this community. If OSI is going to seriously claim that Eric is a 
fervent believer in Open Source, I think he should be expected to 
explain his past actions.

I feel that any attempt to describe ESR as someone who is trusted by the 
community requires more rationale than has been provided by OSI. I have, 
in the entirity of my life, never met anyone who claimed that ESR is a 
member of the community. The majority have described him as an arrogant, 
sexist, lecherous cunt. I have no desire whatsoever to associte myself 
with him.

[1]http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1997/06/msg00138.html
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org