Option A: Psychotic breakdown
Option B: Ethical impracticality
Option C: Political extremism
Option D: Two contradictory things at once
Option E: Something that doesn't prevent the other options but packaged with something nasty and unpalatableOption F: Sensible but ultimately vague and action-less common place neutrality.
Option G: Nuclear optionOption H: Donothing
It was such a brain dead exercise in futility. It was designed for the winner from the start.
Nussbaun’s comment on the result is hilariously dull:
On a very personal note, I regret that the winning option does not
acknowledge all the legitimate concerns around AI: environmental impact,
copyright and licensing uncertainty, the health of Free Software
communities, and the strain of aggressive scraping on the open web.
The GR results give us raw numbers about our opinion, and a direction,
but we have a lot of work ahead of us to act as a community and
understand how we can continue to accommodate the very large minority
that would have preferred to ban or discourage AI.
Lucas
¹ obligatory disclosure: the script used is AI-generated
Yeah, the option that doesn’t say anything won. Who knew?…wait yes, mathematicians, they knew. The most important part of a survey is choosing the options carefully.
How was it “designed for the winner”? Proposals to a resolution vote are submitted and seconded, with no restrictions on who, how many or what proposals are added, you just have to be a voting member of the ML. You can look at the list of proposal sponsors and the seconds to see how that’s done.
I skim them all. The options I wrote are soft parodies of what each said. There’s a ton of problems with this model of governance, but I’m no voting member, so my opinion has no impact.
That said, it makes it so a single posture has to be voted on in its entirety, which is dumb (as some legislative bodies of the world have proven). As a result, nuance is erased alongside with any sense of ideological vision or compromise, and instead it promotes vagueness in every action and glacial institutions that break slowly break apart.
The very person who wrote the proposal that won reacted to winning with:
I regret the loss of contributors (which would have happened with either option winnign [sic]). It is just too early to take a final decision on the mater [sic]. Let’s revisit this in two years or so, and let this mess of a GR be a warning for our future selves.
The proposal was designed to win time without having to take any real stance while taking the smallest loss of contributors in the process. And thus it was written as the most milketoast nothing burger. When an infinite set of possibilities exists that actually do address real concerns like climate impact, social impacts, copyright and legal problems related to generated code, etc. in relation to the principles and overall values of the project. Instead, they are deferring the practicalities to pull request’s bickering.
But again, I’m not a voting member or contributor. So my opinion is null. I still think the way the process is designed and conducted is stupid and prone to cause the eventual failure of debian via governance collapse.
The Debian vote was so stupid:
Option A: Psychotic breakdown Option B: Ethical impracticality Option C: Political extremism Option D: Two contradictory things at once Option E: Something that doesn't prevent the other options but packaged with something nasty and unpalatable Option F: Sensible but ultimately vague and action-less common place neutrality. Option G: Nuclear option Option H: Do nothingIt was such a brain dead exercise in futility. It was designed for the winner from the start.
Nussbaun’s comment on the result is hilariously dull:
Yeah, the option that doesn’t say anything won. Who knew?…wait yes, mathematicians, they knew. The most important part of a survey is choosing the options carefully.
How was it “designed for the winner”? Proposals to a resolution vote are submitted and seconded, with no restrictions on who, how many or what proposals are added, you just have to be a voting member of the ML. You can look at the list of proposal sponsors and the seconds to see how that’s done.
https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002
I skim them all. The options I wrote are soft parodies of what each said. There’s a ton of problems with this model of governance, but I’m no voting member, so my opinion has no impact.
That said, it makes it so a single posture has to be voted on in its entirety, which is dumb (as some legislative bodies of the world have proven). As a result, nuance is erased alongside with any sense of ideological vision or compromise, and instead it promotes vagueness in every action and glacial institutions that break slowly break apart.
The very person who wrote the proposal that won reacted to winning with:
The proposal was designed to win time without having to take any real stance while taking the smallest loss of contributors in the process. And thus it was written as the most milketoast nothing burger. When an infinite set of possibilities exists that actually do address real concerns like climate impact, social impacts, copyright and legal problems related to generated code, etc. in relation to the principles and overall values of the project. Instead, they are deferring the practicalities to pull request’s bickering.
But again, I’m not a voting member or contributor. So my opinion is null. I still think the way the process is designed and conducted is stupid and prone to cause the eventual failure of debian via governance collapse.