121–130 of 191 posts
This comment section is proof positive of why the Steering Committee was a good choice.
" to is proof that is good" is among the worst arguments in the world. It applies equally well to any non-unanimous change, therefore it means nothing.
Councils, committees, multiple obtuse voting systems, governance documents, 'courts' of appeal... Why are they so keen to construct such a grim bureaucracy for themselves?
Politics in organisations is pretty grim. But, what would you have as an alternative? Decisions need to be made. Disagreements need to be resolved. Ad hoc resolutions to problems doesn't scale with increasing team size. Neither does anarchy. I don't think many people relish the idea of imposing such bureaucracy upon themselves and their fellow developers. However, when you have a sizeable organisation, there needs to…
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I suspect you're being downvoted because these models don't particularly resemble democracy, which would presumably involve having the users of the software vote, rather than the developers of the software.
In Westminster-style democracies, party members elect their party's leader (the general public don't get to decide who the leader of a particular party is). In America, you can only vote in primaries (that is, choose presidential and other candidates) if you are a registered voter of that party -- which means that it's also restricted to a subset of the public. So I'm not sure I agree it is a mismatch to most democra…
Councils, committees, multiple obtuse voting systems, governance documents, 'courts' of appeal... Why are they so keen to construct such a grim bureaucracy for themselves?
Otherwise, every time there's a decision to be made, you will have to have arguments^Wdiscussion^Warguments not just about the substantive content of the decision, but about the process of making the decision too.
This goes double for the stuff like "votes of no confidence". If it comes to that point, the group is already in deep enough trouble as it is. The last thing you need is to add a debate about the means to handle the trouble on top of the discussion of the actual trouble.
You spell these things out in advance so that when questions arise in the course of the group making choices, the fundamental question of "how are we going to go about finding the answer to this question" is already settled.
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> it does speak to potential limitations of the model The parent compared a group of volunteers with the largest open-source company in the world, which is a part S&P 500. No other Linux distribution has a comparable amount of resources. Even Canonical is following the RedHat's lead (systemd, Wayland, PulseAudio).
RedHat wasn’t always as big as it is now. In fact, it was likely smaller than Debian, in terms of manpower, for some time. I suspect the total number of package maintainers is still higher on the Debian side.
At the end of the day, I suppose this is simply yet another form of NIH
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Not no process, since Matz is effectively BDFL, isn't he?
That’s the abscence of process. No votes, no committees, no grown people pretending they’re a court of appeal.
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I think there's nothing wrong with re-using good solutions that others have worked out instead of building your own just for the sake of being different. That's the open-source idea even, no? Freely reuse and build upon the work of others, so that we don't have to reinvent things again and again.
And yet open source is constantly reinventing the same things over and over again anyway. I think parent's complaint is that Debian's model has failed to produce good solutions of its own, and while that isn't necessarily a requirement, it does speak to potential limitations of the model
I think this is the first time I've heard someone critique a model for encouraging anti-NIH syndrome.
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I think a new BFDL would be a worse-is-better solution than all this play-government formality, to be honest. It seems to be an effective system for many languages, including Python in the past.
Hi, former BDFL here. It's a crappy job. A crappy, unpaid job. I can't think of a single qualified person in the Python community who'd want the gig. (I can think of several unqualified people who would, and that's part of the problem too.)
Did Guido rage quit because of this?
I find it fascinating that programmers like to discuss governance at such great lengths without any reference to the vast knowledge of Political Theory that lies at their fingertips. At the end of the day, I suppose this is simply yet another form of NIH
I think the moment political theory is mentioned, the response is basically that politics are gross and we should do better than that. This appears to stem from the idea that politics and all the negative aspects of it stem from some location other than people haggling over limited resources. This thought process is both ridiculously naive and a highly ineffective way to go about running a community.
This thought process is not unique to engineering. You see it all the time in various utopian projects on both the left and the right. The idea that you can escape the grossness of political processes to a land of total freedom from capital/tyranny (left & right respectively) is extremely popular, and extremely silly. Time and time again we see these movements immediately recreate the problems they decry because the problem was people all along.