I agree with you Chris, but can we keep religion out of this?

On Wed Jan 29 2014 at 7:30:32 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 11:29 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
> You start with people who have full exclusive rights and contributing then
> compare them to people who are willing to help, but don't do this. Then you
> remove the obstacles to include these people.

There's a fundamental misunderstanding behind this, I think.

Contributions are valued, yes, but the purpose of an open source
project does not begin and end at "encouraging contributions from
every person on the planet". The goal of Python is to be a useful and
usable programming language, and if that's best served by a single
person doing all the coding, then that's how the project should be
run. (I'm preeeeeetty confident that's not the case, though.)

There's a general feeling around the world that dictatorships are bad,
democracy is good, and the more people you have involved in something,
the better. While this is not entirely false, it's not entirely true
either. In the Bible, in the book of Proverbs, God tells us several
times that multiple people's advice is of value. [1] [2] [3] But
that's advice, not decision making. When it comes down to a final
decision, it's almost always best to have a single person decide. A
business has a CEO, an orchestra have a conductor, there's only one
steering wheel in a car. And ultimately, trying to make every single
thought behind every single decision public is counter-productive too.
Ever tried to answer a child's "Why? Why? Why?" machine-gun? Yeah.

On another project, I've contributed a large number of patches. Some
fix bugs, some add features, some just fix little typos in
documentation. All of them were simply submitted to the core team,
reviewed, and ultimately applied, rejected, or modified. I'm not a
core dev. I can't push to the git repository. But if I were to be
given that power, it would be for reasons of convenience (if the core
devs decide that all my patches are getting applied anyway, and it's
easier for them to let me push my own), not transparency. You want to
know what's going on? Get involved. Then you'll know.

The people who care about the project will find a way to contribute.
That's a fundamental of the open source model. You don't like the
agreement that has to be signed before your patches will be accepted?
Then contribute by reviewing other people's patches, or verifying bug
reports, or whatever. Onus is not on the python.org legal team to make
everything work for you; it's their job to make everything work for
the PSF. I haven't looked into the specifics of the agreement in
detail, but I'm confident that the PSF would not demand something just
for the sake of bureaucracy, so I'd trust that there's good reason for
all of it. (And hey. if you don't want to sign that, you can just
declare that your contributions are public domain, IIRC.)

I'm sure it's very American to demand that the people in power tell
you what they're doing. (Or insert any other country name there,
though I think the USA is at the forefront of this.) Trouble is, open
source projects simply aren't built that way.

ChrisA

[1] Prov 11:14 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs%2011:14
[2] Prov 15:22 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs%2015:22
[3] Prov 24:6 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs%2024:6
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