Michael,
Thanks for your criticism. I have taken several days to think about
it. I have not discussed my thoughts with the board and I am
speaking only for myself and to my own relationship to the project.
I agree with you that there are some technical problems with how the
renaming was done; in particular, changes of variable or object names
in the source is unnecessary from a branding standpoint and
unnecessarily destabilizing. It's possible we could revert those
mistakes and perhaps we should. I think Jeff has responded to these
thoughts too.
But this is a very small part of the dissatisfaction expressed in your
letter. Mostly you are dissatisfied with all aspects of the board's
behavior.
You would like the board to take more direct and authoritative action
guiding development. In fact the bylaws currently say something to
this effect: we'll within 24 hours set the priority and assign to a
developer all bug fixes and feature requests submitted on sourceforge.
To me this is eminently silly and you are right that I do not take
this responsibility seriously. I do not feel I have the authority to
assign ANYTHING to ANYONE and I certainly don't have the authority to
prioritize their "action items". I am not a development manager and
none of our developers are my employees. Our developers, me included,
take on bug fixes and improvements as we feel qualified to tackle
them, and as we have time and energy to spare in our day-to-day lives.
I will say more about this later.
Now on the other hand, you would have liked the board to take a less
direct/authoritative and more community-oriented approach to the
problems posed by emc.com's lawyer, even suggesting that perhaps a
community member may have had the experience to handle it better and
get us a better outcome. I will say more about this later too.
Now I do not claim to do everything right, or to have given the
project my full attention at all times in the last, uh, decade or so
that I've been involved, or that I've always handled every question
to the best of my ability. I hope nobody expects that of me.
But aside from that, I see that we have a fundamental disagreement
about the role of the board. The things I think the board should
handle are something like this:
Represent the project in general to the outside world, being a
point of contact for companies, lawyers, etc.
Keep tabs on the infrastructure the whole project needs, make
smart decisions about it, and keep it working. This is stuff
like the DNS, the key used to sign the apt repositories, the
websites, arrangements with services that recognize our
project somehow like sourceforge and freenode and the Linux
foundation, and so on.
This task also includes things like
studying/advocating/implementing the switch from cvs to git.
It also includes deciding in general how we use vc (merging
strategy, stable release branches, feature branches) and
trying to keep people doing that properly.
Maintain the set of keys from pushers and offer push access to
contributors who show consistent quality and express an
intention to stick around for a while, and hopefully a bit of
guidance to new folks on using vc correctly, the stuff I
mentioned above.
Select release managers that can help a branch become stable
and eventually get released (so far these have been board
members, but I think they don't need to be).
I value your great contributions to the project and am sorry
that you don't have the guidance you want. For example I hear you
talking about a task/interpreter restructure that you are interested
in, and that you have made some progress but want feedback. When
you get no feedback I understand that you can't tell if it's because
nobody cares, or because nobody feels qualified to help you in that
way. In the case of me personally, it's the latter. I'm not an
expert in object oriented design and it does no good for you to tell
me about your design. I have no useful input.
On the other hand, when you show (not tell) me that you have something
that makes the system better, like when you shared your remapping
work, I helped you test and became your advocate and helped you get it
merged. I think it's a little unfair to say that you've had
complete silence from the board or board members; I do understand
though that the moments of silence do stick in one's mind.
Now, about the decision to rebrand and how we came to it:
The first letter from the lawyer was directly to me. I hope you and
others can understand that since there is no LinuxCNC organization and
that we are only a bunch of individuals, those of us with (titular?)
authority and responsibility had particular personal danger in this
proceeding. My goals personally (again I am not speaking for the
others) were, in order:
Protect myself and other individuals involved in the project
from a ruinous lawsuit brought by an immensely wealthy
multinational corporation that could cause grave hardship for
us and our loved ones;
Find an outcome that allows the continuation of the LinuxCNC
project with as little disruption as possible, and that is
likely to help us avoid more of this kind of mess in the
future;
Not piss off other developers and users too much.
I think we have succeeded with #1 and #2, and not very well with #3.
I assure you I went through the same stages of being angry, wanting
a fight, questioning the claims, being mad about US trademark law,
and so on, that others have gone through since the announcement. I
also came to the conclusion that a rename, while inconvenient, would
be *better* for our project in the long run, and would not unduly
break us from our history. I am happy to see that several people
on the list have come to this conclusion too.
I feel that coming forward immediately and making the letter to me
public would have resulted in a worse outcome. In fact I think it is
likely that this action would have resulted in many mad people
attacking emc.com in different ways, and I think it is possible that
we may have failed on goals #1 and certainly #2 had the board done
that. It is unarguably the case, being in the US, that emc.com could
have caused the disappearance of our entire web presence with only a
few phonecalls or letters, for instance. Due to the nature of free
software, happily, they could not have caused the disappearance of the
software. But they could have caused the project a lot of disruption
even if they did not choose to go after individuals.
I am happy with the outcome we have now, and I feel that emc.com
worked with us to come to a fair and workable solution, and once it
settles down we will be fine and the project will go on. I think it
was the right decision for the board to handle this for the community.
I think doing that was EXACTLY the job of the board and we handled it
fine. I know that reasonable people, like you, disagree.
In summary, I think it is valuable for us to have a discussion about
what we want the board to be. You say it serves primarily a social
function, and I think it serves primarily an administrative function.
I don't want to put words in your mouth but from my observations I
believe you feel the people on the board should be savvy programmers
who can guide the technical progress of the code base. I don't
necessarily see that as a requirement, and in fact in the past I
nominated one or more people who are huge advocates for the project
but who have little or no technical familiarity with the code.
I think the community guides the code base, and for instance we get
neat features, like remapping, when smart people like you come along
and get interested in it -- not when the board decides it's an
action item on a list. I think that's how community-driven
development works and we should hope for nothing else. I think
having lists and voting for priorities and so on, as others have
suggested, is even further down this road of misunderstanding how
community-driven projects work. Also I've seen over time that
there's nothing worse than asking people what they want, getting a
vote or whatever, and then not giving them that because there's no
authority to make it happen. It just makes everyone unhappy.
I think it will be valuable, after this discussion about what we want
the board to be, to have a new election, as we are certainly overdue.
The discussion about the board's purpose may help determine who will
and won't run. I think that is a good thing. Perhaps we can update
some bylaws that are out of date (or out of touch) to reflect what
we collectively think the new board should do. Or, on the other end
of the spectrum, if we feel the board serves no important purpose,
maybe we should disband it and be entirely community-driven.
This is a long message about a lot of issues; please forgive me if
my wording is not as good as it could be, or if I've accidentally
spoken for someone incorrectly or ungenerously.
Chris
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