My analysis is fundamentally different than Matthew
and Benjamin's for a few reasons.
1. The problem has been miscast.
The "economic interests" of the developers *always*
has had an apparent conflict with the economic
interests of the users: users want developers to work more
on the code, and developers need to make a living, which
often involves spending their time on other things.
On this score, nothing has really changed.
2. It seems pretty clear that Matthew wants some governance
power to be held by individuals who are not actively
developing NumPy. As Chuck Harris pointed out long ago,
that dog ain't going to hunt.
3. Constitutions can be broken (and are, all the time).
Designing a stable institution requires making it in
the interests of the members to participate.
Any formal governance structure that can be desirable
for the NumPy community as a whole has to be desirable
for the core developers. The right way to produce a
governance structure is to make concrete proposals and
show how these proposals are in the interest of the
*developers* (as well as of the users).
For example, Benjamin obliquely suggested that with an
appropriate governance board, the NA discussion could
have simply been shut down by having the developers
vote (as part of their governance). This might be in
the interest of the developers and of the community
(I'm not sure), but I doubt it is what Matthew has in mind.
In any case, until proposals are put on the table along
with a clear effort to illustrate why it is in the interest
of the *developers* to adopt the proposals, I really do not
see this discussion moving forward.
fwiw,
Alan Isaac
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