[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] replace some static with asm_visibility or so

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 04:46:31AM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > > * not following democratic vote on mplayer-dev-eng about uotis account
> > 
> > Democracy is more than just voting, you need a constitution.  You could
> > say that the policy document is such a thing, but it says nothing about
> > voting or when an account should or will be revoked.
> 
> You dont need a constitution, a constitution can help clarify some things
> but its not strictly essential. Any group of N people can just vote about
> something without writing a constitution first.

I disagree strongly with this claim. Without a constitution specifying
how the voting works, voting cannot be meaningful unless there's
always a clear dichotomy between choices and everyone agrees on who
gets to vote, etc. Whenever there are more than 2 choices, voting is a
highly nontrivial matter, and usually when there are only 2 choices
it's because the person calling the vote framed the question in a
biased way by setting up false dichotomies... (I'm talking about
voting in general not ffmpeg/mplayer history...)

These sorts of issues, among other things, are why consensus process
is generally more respected than 'plain democratic vote' among folks
working in the social justice field.

Rich