[Numpy-discussion] Numpy governance update

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Peter Wang <pwang at streamitive.com> wrote:
> 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.

The difference is fairly obvious to me, but stop me if I'm wrong.
First - although Enthought was in a position to influence numpy
development, it didn't very much, partly, I suppose because Travis did
not have time to contribute to numpy.  The exception is of course the
masked array stuff by Mark that caused a lot of controversy.

>  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.

Obviously we should be realistic about the risks.   Situations like
that are very unlikely.

> But such things never transpired, and of course most of us know that such things would never happen.

Right.

> 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.

It would be silly to be worried about Travis contributing to numpy, in general.

Best,

Matthew