Frank W. Zammetti wrote:
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
A third point that I must make in this context is that, though, in the
above, I am criticizing the "electoral democracy" aspects of this, I
actually don't subscribe to the idea that an open source project is a
one man-one vote democracy of any sort anyway. For example, in the
FreeMarker project, the opinion of somebody who has made some tiny
contribution to the code (and is thus a "committer") cannot be
considered equal to mine, when simply most of the current core code
base was written by me. And thus, the idea that this person's vote is
equal to mine strikes me as absurd. It would be equally absurd if I
joined another project, and after making a nominal contribution,
considered that my vote was equal to that of someone who had written,
say, 80% of the code.
You might be interested in the bylaws I wrote for Java Web Parts:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=140728
Frank, it's interesting to look at this and see what people have worked
up wrt project management issues and how to resolve disagreements and so
on.
But, as I said before, I don't believe that open source projects are one
man-one-vote democracies anyway. As a practical matter, the direction of
a project is mostly determined by who is willing to put in the most energy.
That the people who really do the heavy lifting call the shots is how it
must be AFAICS.
Most importantly in the context of this discussion is the fact that
ANYONE who contributes AT ALL can vote and HAVE THEIR VOTE COUNT.
Non-contributors can vote too, but are non-binding (I am considering
changing this).
I have a weighting system for how peoples' votes count... "contributors"
count as 1, "developers" (aka committers) count as 1.5 and
"administrators" (aka the PMC) count as 2. The only requirement is that
a person be subscribed to the mailing list, since all voting takes place
there. There is a formula used to calculate the final result of a vote,
and simple majority carries the vote.
Well, have you considered the positional issues I raised in the earlier
post? The order in which people vote is quite important. Offhand, here
is an idea:
Maybe you should have a vote that is non-binding among the simple users.
Effectively if most users are against something, then the idea is not
immediately rejected, but it is indicative of a need for more debate. If
most users are in favor, then you could move on to the committers voting
and so on.
The problem is that once the people higher on your pecking order, your
PMC, vote +1, this will bias the votes of the lower status people.
(Also, the PMC are the people who are -- hopefully -- more involved and
are likely to put in their votes with less delay.) The results of the
voting is bound to be highly dependent on the order in which voting
takes place, don't you think?
By the way, the definition of "contributor" is "anyone that contributes
to JWP". I probably should refine that definition a bit :) But, the
point is that I wanted it to be a very low barrier of entry, so even if
you just point out a batch of spelling errors in the documentation, you
would be considered a contributor and get a counted vote.
I bet some of the people on the contributors list don't even know they
have a vote! :) In truth though, we have yet to have an actual vote on
anything, so I suppose it's all untested.
The voting system is perhaps a bit convoluted, but I tried to write it
in such a way that no one person, INCLUDING ME, could grab control of
the project. There is also veto power on all votes, and more
importantly, an override provision... for instance, while I as an
Administrator can veto any vote, either of the other two developers can
call for an override vote. I of course cannot vote in the override
vote, and if my veto is overridden, that's the final word, I cannot
override the veto.
I have no doubt there are flaws in my system, but my goal was to give
everyone a voice, and to ensure that the will of the majority would be
done no matter what.
Your intent is good, but I am skeptical that all this formalized voting
is really the way open source projects should work. I'm not saying I
have all the alternatives figured either.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Frank
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