Re: A GNU “social contract”?

[Andreas Enge]

Hello!

On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 04:36:52PM +0000, Brandon Invergo wrote:
> A social contract is only a necessity in a community-run organization
> because it helps prevent the organization from moving off-course.
> (...)
> If you believe
> GNU should be community-run, then you'll want to see a social contract;

I agree with this part, and this is indeed my motivation to work on it.
What is so frightening in having GNU be community run? To me this looks
like the logical implementation of a volunteer based organisation, in
particular an organisation that has as goals the freedom and self-empower-
ment of the users of a computer system. Then why should the people who
implement this not also be self-empowered?

> if you think it should be run as it currently is, then it's impossible
> to see a use for it.

With this I disagree. A social contract has a use independently of the
governance model, to define the goals of the organisation and also what
the people working towards these goals are expected to heed. Even in an
autocratic organisation this makes sense. (Now Alfred claims that main-
tainers, for instance, have a purely technical role. But even then, in
this technical function, they are expected to heed the principles that
we have been outlining in the social contract; notwithstanding that I
find it insulting to treat participants in a voluntary organisation as
dispensable workforce.)

So I would think that we could agree on the social contract independently
of what we would like as governance model for GNU. (Except that, of course,
if you do not want any change at all in the governance model, then you have
a motivation for also blocking this document.)

> That would give another
> opportunity to publicly shame rms and the GNU project as it actually is:
> "Look at this beautiful document that rms refused to implement for GNU!
> The fact that he *disagrees* with these points shows that he is not fit
> to lead GNU anymore!".

I think you are going a bit overboard here. Independently of Richard's
fitness for leading GNU (on which I will not comment right now, the goal in
this thread is not to discuss individual persons), I think a more community
run model for GNU will be beneficial.

Also I disagree that discussing GNU in public amounts to shaming. Not
everything works well, but there is no shame in admitting this in public.
GNU is a wonderful project, and we are interested in improving it and
making it work better; obviously we have different opinions on how this
can be achieved, but this is perfectly normal, and I see no problem for
an organisation working in the public interest to have such discussions in
public.

Andreas