Peter Neubauer wrote:
On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 08:24 +0900, David Leangen wrote:
I know I don't contribute much to the project. I am merely a user that began using Avalon recently. I hope to become a contributor to the project, but for now, I'm not. So, it's probably not really my place to make any comments here.
Thanks David for that reply. It is exactly that position that I am myself and that made me pull off this vote in the first place.
As for users/non-committers being part of the community, at least 1.whoever can start a vote,even a user 2.whoever can vote, even a user 3.only votes from members of the "community" (which is to be defined, but I think in this case accepted committers) are counted. Which I think highlights your point about who is counted part of the community.
The other question I think is relevant here is how long/much vetos are valid and why they are for lifetime right now, which can lead to inactive members of the community blocking progress because of old merits.
It would be great if a project could be able to renew itself on it's own, and not, as it seems now, be forced to rebrand, refocus, restaff, relocate just to get on with some new thoughts on the same base concept, as it is with Excalibur etc.. To me, it seems that this is a waste of effort and above all distracting for users that will have to keep track of which new project the driving people are heading off to right now because the current project is blocking their thoughts, not on technical grounds (which could lead to forking) but on political reasons.
<board-hat mode="off">
Peter,
the board sent back the resolution *exactly* because it doesn't want to make decisions for you, it either says "yes we like it" or "no we don't".
for excalibur was "if you want this, take it". I personally thought it was a bad idea, but as a director I voted yes because that's what they wanted and I would be pretty bad for me to abuse my director hat to enforce my personal views on something.
for metro, the board was concerned in stephen's style and community vision that has created more problems than it solved.
Stephen has his own view about community dynamics. This is just great and I personally respect that. But I have seen that this style doesn't really match well with the rest of the communities that follow a different style.
Is that bad "per se"? no, but I am concerned about this because it's drawing energy away from the board and for little/no overall benefit (since all the projects now dislike avalon's attitude and try to move away from it).
Forking? I personally would love if the metro "community" as defined by Stephen went somewhere else to show that they can do that: use this style of community building to work.
JBoss is an example of a community where this style of friction-based consensus was incouradged because they thought it fostered innovation. [little sidenote: ask the Geronimo people how they liked that]
The ASF has one style of doing communities and we created the incubator to filter communities based on that style.
The board will *NOT* allow other styles to get to top level without being put in a sandbox first because we don't trust this style of community building. Period.
It's a conservative approach, true, and might even be wrong and Stephen might be the biggest innovator in community-building procedures for what I know, but he lost trust here and will take a long time to build it back.
Would Metro decide to go somewhere else, I would be a strong supporter of that, including making the ASF release the code under public domain so that you can do whatever you want with it, including relicensing.
But you want to stay inside, you play by the rules.
And if you don't like the rules, you get on community@ and you start advocating for changes.
You will find a lot of inertia but this is because the ASF created a lot of value with these rules and the biggest the organization the harder it is to change it (believe me, I know what I say here).
But I'm personally very open to changes, just you need to show that the ASF as a whole can benefit from them, and so far this "community" behaved in such a sellfish way that alienated everybody around it (and even some inside of it).
</board-hat mode="off">
<board-hat mode="on">
Now, the equation I have in my hands is:
o) friendly consensus -> slow pace -> poor PR -> self-managing projects -> long-term stability -> ASF scales
o) friction-based decision making -> fast growth -> great PR -> one-man-shows -> long-term instability -> ASF does not scale
and I am asked to decide to promote this "other style" to top level.
The answer is no.
I don't buy it.
It's dangerous.
I see it as a disease that might spread like fire in other projects because it does have a short-term benefit that might be attractive to some (like all the users around here that benefit from free-riding) but have very big side effects down the road (like when they realize that this train has ransomed them and they can't get off).
So, my goal is to contain it or expell it entirely.
not the code, not the community, but the community-building style.
</board-hat mode="on">
-- Stefano.
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