On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 7:57 AM, Ben de Groot <[email protected]> wrote: >> I said > As it is always happy to point out, Council doesn't see itself as > leadership, just as a supreme court of appeal, when everything else > seems to have failed. It likes to get involved as little as possible.
The last time I talked to Council she said that she doesn't like it when you anthropomorphize her. Certainly I stated in my manifesto that I believe that Council members SHOULD be leaders, and should not limit their leadership of the distro to casting votes. That's why we're chatting on a list, and I'm not sitting back waiting for you to put this issue on a Council agenda. > >> We >> also have Comrel, which is a better starting point for cases >> concerning individuals vs policies. > > This also displays little real leadership. It concerns itself with > conflict resolution, with various degrees of success. (I still have a > bad taste in my mouth from my past dealings with that institution.) Well, that is the role of Comrel. I don't expect it to decide whether developers can touch each other's ebuilds to add systemd units to them, etc. However, if the Council establishes a policy then Comrel should certainly take issue with devs that ignore that policy. Comrel certainly can show leadership when it comes to how it operates, facilitating better relations in the community in general, etc. > > The costs are higher than the benefits, in my opinion. Where are the > use cases for this high-cost solution that is being pushed upon us? Where are the costs for this high-cost solution that you purport the existence of? Just what about this solution is difficult to maintain? I keep hearing that it is painful, but I haven't seen specific examples of HOW it is painful. >> The problem with having top-down leadership in a volunteer-based >> organization is that it tends to drive away anybody who doesn't agree >> with the leader. If a supreme leader said "mgorny has the right >> solution to multilib - everybody is going to work to implement it" >> that would probably cause more harm than good. Everybody wants a >> supreme leader until the leader backs something they oppose. > > But what's the alternative? Having a few dozen self-appointed leaders > doing whatever they want, and often taking things in opposing > directions. It's not top-down leadership, but rule of the strongest. When you have officially-appointed leaders they usually tend to be the same people who would otherwise be the self-appointed leaders. They just have more power to kick everybody out who disagrees with them. It is still the rule of the strongest. How did Linus become the leader of Linux? He wrote it... I used to get philosophical about things like this, but I think the model Gentoo has is actually not a bad one. In the end, stuff only gets done if people write code. Your power in any FOSS project really comes down to your ability to write code or convince others to write code on your behalf. We can argue about what piece of software is conceptually the best, but implemented software will almost always win over the unimplemented competitor, unless the merits of the competitor are such that people will flock behind it and actually implement it. Rich
