Legitimizing the Recommendations (Was: Re: [vorbis] Vorbis Comment question)

[Jonathan Walther]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 05:12:19AM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
>Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
>> The "recommendations" are not regulations - they are agreements.
>
>Agreements between Jonathan Walther and himself, mostly. The
>reactor-core paper is his, and it reflects what he wanted and what other
>people managed to convince him to add, remove, or change. Even to call
>it a set of "agreements" is an overstatement; the process by which these
>"agreements" were reached was so grossly biased in Jonathan's favor that
>it's an insult to the very concept of consensus to call them
>"agreements" at all. It's his paper, so he had total control over it and
>total freedom to do as he pleased; there was no notion of voting on
>disputed issues, nor was majority or consensus approval even a part of
>Jonathan's goals as far as I could tell.

I suppose you could make the same accusations of the Declaration of
Independance, and the Linux kernel.  George Washington wrote the first
draft entirely by himself, based on comments from all the founding
fathers for the several years previous. He submitted it for their
approval, and they went through an iterative process to come to the
document we today know as America's Declaration of Independance.  I
don't think this makes it any less a document of the people.  America
accepted the Declaration as it's own even though it was the work of one
"dictatorial" man working in cooperation with dozens of others.

Jonathan


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