Somebody proposes that a person is added to the list of people with checkin privileges. If nobody else in the group vetoes that, then they're in (their system doesn't require continual participation by each member, so it can only operate at a veto level, rather than a unanimous assent). It is basically determined on the basis of merit -- has the person been active (on the Apache developer's mailing list) and has the person contributed something significant? Further, by providing commit access, will they further the goals of Apache? And, of course, does their temperament seem to fit in with the other group members?
This makes sense, but I have one concern: if somebody who isn't liked very much (say a capable hacker who is a real troublemaker) asks for privileges, would people veto this? I'd be reluctant to go on record as veto'ing a particular person. (E.g. there are a few troublemakers in c.l.py, and I would never want them to join python-dev let alone give them commit privileges, but I'm not sure if I would want to discuss this on a publicly archived mailing list -- or even on a privately archived mailing list, given that the number of members might be in the hundreds. [...stuff I like...]
I'll note that the process works very well given that diffs are emailed. I doubt that it would be effective if people had to fetch CVS diffs themselves.
That's a great idea; I'll see if we can do that to our checkin email, regardless of whether we hand out commit privileges.
Your note also implies "areas of ownership". This doesn't really exist within Apache. There aren't even "primary authors" or things like that. I have the ability/rights to change any portions: from the low-level networking, to the documentation, to the server-side include processing.
But that's Apache, which is explicitly run as a collective. In Python, I definitely want to have ownership of certain sections of the code. But I agree that this doesn't need to be formalized by access control lists; the social process you describe sounds like it will work just fine. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)