I stand behind Debian to do votes in secrecy. During the RMS issue, I've seen many people who did not have their ferocity under control. This went as far as people wanting to have the "others" removed from the Debian project.

People not being able to cast their vote without having to fear repercussions is justification enough for secret votes.

Is there a good rundown over what people were actually getting mad about with RMS? RMS has done a lot for free software, and while I think the whole GNU/Linux naming pasta is a bit silly, what RMS did with emacs, gcc, and copyleft is genuinely heroic in terms of accomplishment and impact.

So far as I can tell, it's "RMS defended Marvin Minsky" and "RMS said something about sex with teenagers not being super terrible many years ago".

Also, was the Minsky thing related to Epstein? Because if so, it's hard to blame Minsky for falling victim to a international intelligence operation that also ensnared presidents, financiers, and movie moguls, all of whom are far more shrewd and worldly than any mathematician has a right to be. And the right thing would be to blame the foreign power that was doing the ensnaring, IMHO.

I agree with you in spirit, but I believe open voting is a better "ideal" system; Debian as a group just doesn't have the time/motivation to deal with the issues inherent in open voting, and I can't blame them for that.

If you can't justify your vote, then maybe you shouldn't be voting. Anonymous voting should be enjoyed by the masses, never the ones representing them.

> If you can't justify your vote, then maybe you shouldn't be voting.

Sorry, wrong in every possible sense of the word. The only true way for an individual to be free from the consequence of placing their vote is for voting to be anonymous.

Any argument that a voter must face direct repercussions for their vote makes voting pointless.

> Anonymous voting should be enjoyed by the masses, never the ones representing them.

Well, since the debian voters are not, as far as a I know, elected by voters themselves, they are not representing anyone.

Justification doesn't work whe the other side is just yelling white supremacy

Your justifications are useless if they aren't being listened to, which was the problem back then. A huge lack of empathy and understanding.

Debian developers are not representatives. They were not elected, and they are not representing anyone's opinion other than their own. The elected positions in Debian are mostly administrative and any decision requiring voting goes to the developers as a whole, not just the elected officials.

>Stopped using Debian a long time ago

>I'll be using a different version of Linux.

I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your reply, but these are nonsensical statements in context. It's presenting an assumption that the governance systems in other versions are better. I've seen a lot of projects with BDFL leaders and no voting whatsoever. Linux itself is famous for permanently keeping a BDFL in charge and not really having voting, so in some sense we might be able to say they all suffer from a lack of voting methods in some areas.

With secret voting you can deflect responsibility and not really hold anybody accountable, with a benevolent dictator... er, well it can't be anybody but Linus' fault as all decisions flow through him.

That is fundamentally different from what the parent reply is saying and that makes no sense either. The entire point of putting open source code out there for free with no warranty is to avoid accountability, in favor of more transparency. A BDFL is only legally accountable to those who pay their salary, and the companies that care about accountability will pay them in exchange for signing private long-term contracts.

I'm a long term Debian user, and while I'm not sure I'm super happy with this, which distro are you using that is is more transparent than Debian wrt their decision making process?

It goes without saying that all the commercial distros are disqualified. Anything with a (B)DFL is obviously disqualified. Anything run by a small cabal that could easily communicate in an out of band way is disqualified. What do you have left?