Over the past four years (since the infamous Vancouver meeting, roughly), it seems it has slowly become an acceptable practice in this project to come up with backroom decisions instead of coming up with ideas and proposals and building a consensus before moving forward.
A number of projects and changes have been brought forward this way since then. No need to make a list, I think everybody remembers the flamewars pretty well.
Fact is that Vancouver and dunc-tank (only to name those two) have changed the Project in some ways. People resigned, others changed their level of involvement, but more than anything else, there’s been a split in the Developer body. Something broke at some point, and the spirit just isn’t there anymore.
So, we’ll never recover to a state comparable to what Debian was before Vancouver.
When you thought things were bad enough already, they just got worse. We now have people coming up with decisions all by themselves. No asking anyone about it, even in backroom meetings, or only to fake it and ignore their opinions on the matter.
It looks bad, and it is. Talk about communication problems. Talk about power-hungry people.
But let’s talk about cowards, too. The cowards that are bitching about what’s happening but won’t raise their voices on the lists because they’re afraid of looking bad if they disagree with the “big boys”.
We are a free software project. Free as in freedom, free as in speech. If you’re not making use of this freedom, you’re just going to lose it; just like in the “real world”. Actually, you’ve lost some of this freedom already.
If you’re not voicing your opinion, why do you have one in the first place?