Martin Michlmayr Wins DPL

Strike writes "The votes for the new Debian Project Leader are in and the tallying is over, results here. Martin Michlmayr comes out on top, winning 4-0 going head to head against the other three candidates (with the fourth win being over "no candidate"). Last year's DPL Bdale Garbee came in 2nd, with Branden Robinson and Moshe Zadka coming in 3rd and 4th. Michlmayr's platform can be seen here."

Comments

Re:Outcome

[electrician067]

moooooo?

Re:Yup

[0x0d0a]

That's one of the stupidest ad homonems I've ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying something.

Frankly, I think a lot of people would hardly see that as an insult. If I say "most rabbis love long, complicated arguments about interpretations of religious law, though most people don't care in the least about such questions", I think you'd find a lot of rabbis and theologians that would agree. So?

Obviously, I really am not interested in spending hours of my time arguing over the particular classification of a package. It's pretty obvious that my viewpoint is not that of these folks. I'm simply pointing out that people on the Debian ML do do this, and that most people wouldn't. This guy is obsessed with the ideology, rather than the tech. You really can't argue that point.

If there weren't a number of geeks very concerned about things like licensing we wouldn't have Linux in the first place. We might have a nice kernel, but that's a long shot from a Free OS.

Besides the fact that that's completely irrelevant to what I said (I don't believe I said that people obsessed with legalities shouldn't exist), I think most people wouldn't care. What if FreeBSD was the big, popular, multi-distro OS that Linux is today. Would most of us *care* whether the kernel was BSD-licensed instead of GPL licensed? I sure as hell wouldn't.

Since it looks like this is getting into ideology, and you feel arguing ideological technicalities is fun, I'll play the game. I'll take ESR's viewpoint. ESR thinks that Open Source is better because it's *works better*. RMS thinks that Free software is better because it's ideologically distasteful to use non-Free software.

Logically, if open source software is superior, closed-source attempts to compete with it should fail (we'll assume perfect consumer information...naive model, but unless you really think that open source can be toppled by marketing...). So if MS takes the BSD kernel and tries to make a superior fork (closed source), they should lose out to the open source fork.

Therefore, I claim that the only people who claim that the GPL is necessary (rather than the BSD license) are those who (a) feel that open source software is inferior to closed source software, (b) feel that open source is so marginally better than closed source software that a simple influx of marketing will forever bar open source software from the market, or (c) are irrational.

Chew on that.

Debian's view is pretty simple: "If the software we use isn't Free, then someone can legally ask us to stop using it. Therefore, our operating system and its tools will always be Free, and no parts of it will ever depend on any software that is not Free."

I'm pretty sure that's *not* their view. If it is, it's wrong. There are plenty of non-Free licenses that someone cannot ask you to not use. Suppose you have to redistribute non-distributed modifications? That's incompatible with the GPL, so of course Stallman gets twitchy and calls it non-Free. But no one can ask you to "stop using the OS".

If that's not important to you keep using Red Hat, or Gentoo, or rolling your own.

Yeah, because Red Hat is just so anti-Free software.

I suppose you're the type to bitch about the ACLU being a bunch of extremists but posted a "Microsoft sucks" comment when they try to censor Slashdot, eh?

Actually, yes. You can't justify the ACLU's extreme viewpoints by arguing that the particular (IMHO egregious) case of MS censoring Slashdot is out of line. You're taking a slippery slope argument ("well, you don't support the ACLU, so you must support Microsoft censoring Slashdot").

There, that ideology-arguing enough for you?