On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 12:04 AM, <josef.pktd@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 10:22 PM, Eric Firing <efiring@hawaii.edu> wrote:
On 2015/09/04 10:53 AM, Matthew Brett wrote:
On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
1) I very much agree that governance can make or break a project. However, the actual governance approach often ends up making less difference than the people involved.
2) While the FreeBSD and XFree examples do point to some real problems with the "core" model it seems that there are many other projects that are using it quite successfully.
I was just rereading the complaints about the 'core' structure from high-level NetBSD project leaders:
"[the "core" and "board of directors"] teams are dysfunctional because they do not provide leadership: all they do is act reactively to requests from users and/or to resolve internal disputes. In other words: there is no initiative nor vision emerging from these teams (and, for that matter, from anybody)." [1]
"There is no high-level direction; if you ask "what about the problems with threads" or "will there be a flash-friendly file system", the best you'll get is "we'd love to have both" -- but no work is done to recruit people to code these things, or encourage existing developers to work on them." [2]
This is consistent with Chris's first point.
Do you mean Chris' point that "I very much agree that governance can make or break a project"? Charles Hannum's complaints about NetBSD are very specific in blaming the model rather than the people. I think the XFree86 story supports the same conclusion - that the governance model caused a sense of diffused responsibility that lead to bad decisions and lack of direction.
I imagine we will have to reconcile ourselves to similar problems, if we adopt the same structures.
Do you have suggestions as to who would make a good numpy president or BDFL and potentially has the time and inclination to do it, or how to identify and recruit such a person?
That's a good question, and the answer is that in the current situation (zero interest in this discussion from the three current members of the numpy leadership team) - no reasonable person would be interested in that job. That's the situation we're in, and so we have to accept that nothing is going to change, with the consequences that implies. If the situation were different, and we had the interest or commitment to explore this problem, then I guess we could discuss other options including the one I suggested further up the thread.
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Today, the project is run by a different cabal. This is the result of a coup that took place in 2000-2001, in which The NetBSD Foundation was taken over by a fraudulent change of the board of directors. (Note: It's probably too late for me to pursue any legal remedy for this, unfortunately.) Although "The NetBSD Project" and "The NetBSD Foundation" were intended from the start to be separate entities -- the latter supplying support infrastructure for the former -- this distinction has been actively blurred since, so that the current "board" of TNF has rather tight control over many aspects of TNP.
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The existing NetBSD Foundation must be disbanded, and replaced with an organization that fulfills its original purpose: to merely handle administrative issues, and not to manage day-to-day affairs.
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It doesn't sound to me like a developer and community driven governance structure to me.
I think that's a separate issue - the distinction between the 'board' and the 'core'. It would be great if the 'core' concept was fine as long as there is no 'board' but I think that's a hard argument to make. Cheers, Matthew