Joel Sherrill wrote: > Note that on the steering committee we represent technical areas > NOT the companies we work for at any given time.
I'd like to emphasize that this is not only true in theory but in practice. It is true that, perhaps, when someone from company X is proposed for a maintainer position there's some bias of SC members from company X to support that person. But, I don't think I've ever felt that was out of putting corporate interests first. Rather, it was that people from company X knew the candidate better, felt perceived weaknesses were not as great as others did, etc. I have always felt that the SC has been admirably free of corporate conflict. I can certainly say that there was no discussion whatsoever of making sure that Google had "its share" of maintainer representation. In fact, the Google-ness of Ian and Diego was not even mentioned. And, if Ian and Diego were at some point to leave Google, they would still be maintainers, but Google won't have any. I don't think the SC is going to worry about that. One advantage of having some SC members who are not GCC developers (and thus seem less involved) is that they are more independent. They have no commercial stake in which companies have maintainers, what development projects are done by whom, etc. Presumably, to the extent they have a vested interest in the outcome it's in making GCC useful for their own development, which is probably as good a bias as any. -- Mark Mitchell CodeSourcery [EMAIL PROTECTED] (650) 331-3385 x713
