At 10:36 PM 10/9/00 -0500, J. David Blackstone wrote:
> > J. David Blackstone wrote:
> >>
> >> When they drafted the U.S. constitution, there was
> >> a huge debate over whether to base congressional representation on
> >> population per state or make each state equal. Both sides had a good
> >> claim to the other being unfair; giving a smaller state (Rhode Island,
> >> or Mac users) equal say with a larger one can seem unfair to the
> >> larger segment, and I think in this case it would be. ("No,
> >> seriously, guys, I think we should move the epoch to 1904.")
> >
> > I agree with jdb. One equivalent vote per person opens the possibility
> > that some company in Redmond could assign 250 of its employees to
> > "go vote in that Perl thing and make it ours".
>
> Ouch. Didn't even think of that.
Or, just as bad, the vote hits slashdot and we have a half-zillion frothing
slashdotties descend on us and either vote their bigotries on us or just
screw around for fun.
> > Also, I'd point out a weakness in the presidential analogy for Larry.
> > The President of the U.S. can only veto; any legislation he ignores
> > passes by default. Also, the President cannot introduce legislation.
> > Rather, Larry is like a king; and we are his ministers, courtiers, and
> > noblemen. We can argue til we're blue, debate, resolve, and vote; but
> > in the end, it's Larry who makes the decision.
>
> Yes, although Larry is kind of like a king after the signing of the
>Magna Carta. There's no divine right, here; if Larry decides we're
>going to eliminate dollar signs for scalars and optimize the core for
>a C<use Python;> module, most of us will jump ship. (Though not
>without tears of regret.)
I'll point out a bigger failing in the analogy. The US isn't a democracy,
none of the states are (except for the odd dabbling in, usually badly, it
with ballot initiatives), and very few municipalities are.
A better analogy is that Larry's the Bishop and Chief Architect, while the
rest of us are engineers, sectional architects, artisans, craftsmen,
journeymen, and apprentices, working to build up a cathedral. (And yes, I
do mean this analogy in the way you likely think I do, amongst other ways)
Regardless, a "design decision by majority vote" just isn't going to fly in
a mostly-volunteer effort, and it rarely does in a commercial effort.
(Whether it results in a working system is a separate matter) If you need
an example, we have Unicode staring us straight in the face. It was put on
the table both out of general need and directly to serve a large part of
the perl userbase (i.e. Windows), and look how far it got us. Heck, 5.6 was
released as tatty as it was *because* people weren't working on the things
that were unfinished.
If a proposal is put forth to handle personnel issues via some sort of
community decision, that's great. If it gets Larry's approval I'm all for
it and will follow the decisions it makes. (Even if, or especially if, the
result is I take my leave) The one thing we should *not* do, though, is
make design decisions by vote. It's worse than decisions via committee--at
least those have some hope of being technically sound.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
