>From the sidelines, Apache projects are encouraged by the norms of the Foundation to actively recruit new committers and to recognize community-positive effort with committer status. Apache projects are, at the same time, given a very wide latitude by the Foundation in making decisions. In my experience across several other projects, if someone has made a significant string of contributions over an extended period of time, it is reasonable for that someone to expect the PMC to give serious consideration to committer status and to offer some sort of meaningful feedback if they choose not to grant it. I suppose that in the extreme a person who feels unfairly excluded could open communication with the Foundations' board; that would be a somewhat extreme course, and it would be a very unusual and extreme situation for the board to dictate to the PMC, but it is theoretically possible.
As I have something of a conflict of interest here, (I am a Foundation member and am thus charged with facilitating the Foundation's mission, but I also pay Glenn to work on FOP), I'll leave my remarks about the Foundation at that. As for the situation at hand, I'm not sure that Glenn quite decoded J.Pietschmann's message, which I read as explaining the current situation in terms of a sleepy PMC rather than an intentionally exclusive one. Or perhaps he is more interested in the net effect of the current situation.
