[Numpy-discussion] Numpy governance update

[Peter Wang]

On Feb 15, 2012, at 3:36 PM, Matthew Brett wrote:

> Honestly - as I was saying to Alan and indirectly to Ben - any formal
> model - at all - is preferable to the current situation. Personally, I
> would say that making the founder of a company, which is working to
> make money from Numpy, the only decision maker on numpy - is - scary.

How is this different from the situation of the last 4 years?  Travis was President at Enthought, which makes money from not only Numpy but SciPy as well.  In addition to employing Travis, Enthought also employees many other key contributors to Numpy and Scipy, like Robert and David.  Furthermore, the Scipy and Numpy mailing lists and repos and web pages were all hosted at Enthought.  If they didn't like how a particular discussion was going, they could have memory-holed the entire conversation from the archives, or worse yet, revoked commit access and reverted changes.

But such things never transpired, and of course most of us know that such things would never happen.  I don't see why the current situation is any different from the previous situation, other than the fact that Travis actually plans on actively developing Numpy again, and that hardly seems scary.


-Peter