Hi Jim,
thanks for speaking up and raising concerns as well.
On 28 Jan 2009, at 14:52, Jim Jagielski wrote:
On Jan 28, 2009, at 8:23 AM, Noah Slater wrote:
On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 08:03:17AM -0500, Jim Jagielski wrote:
If you wish to be a PMC member who isn't, there is a process in
place for that.
Yes, and it's called the ASF process.
All of the above seems to reinforce the concept that one person's vote
is more important than any else's on the PMC. I am struggling to
understand the comprehension failure here. This is *not* the way
the ASF works.
The idea of the BDFL (at least for us) is not to have a more important
vote but to help the PMC decide issues that are hard to decide or need
wise judgement. In the case of a distributed "Notes-style" database,
Damien is clearly the expert among us.
Besides, we didn't even officially "appoint" Damien and new committers
or PMC members do not have to subscribe to the current PMC's ideas.
The ASF has for a long, long, long time avoided and actively
restricted
such concepts as "key developer" or "main author" or other such
things.
The idea is to create a community around the code that does not depend
on a single person, nor is revolved around a single person. It's to
create a community where people can make significant contributions
and know that their vote counts just as much as anyones. It's to
create
a community that *survives*.
We're working on getting Damien out of the place of being the lead-dev,
but for the time being, he has the clearest ideas of what needs to be
done
and we happen to agree with his judgement. He's also the only one being
paid to work on lower CouchDB internals.
I think what binds us is the "Technical Overview"[1] document that
resides
on http://couchdb.apache.org/ It admittedly could do with some updating
but it lays out the general idea of CouchDB and a lot of the specifics
and
that is what so far everybody who joined the community agrees on.
For the future, it is the PMC's job to refine the document and make sure
it aligns with development goals and community and developer requests.
Cheers
Jan
--
[1]: http://couchdb.apache.org/docs/overview.html
