[Numpy-discussion] Numpy governance update

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 10:30 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.  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.

I actually think it is somehow different. For once, while Travis was
at Enthought, he contributed much less to the discussions (by his own
account), so the risk of conflict of interest was not very high. My
own contributions to numpy since I have joined Enthought are close to
nil as well :)

There have been cases of disagreements on NumPy: for any case where
the decision taken by people from one company would prevail, you will
not be able to prevent people from thinking the interests of the
company prevailed. In numpy, where people make a suggestion and there
was not enough review, the feature generally went in. This is
fundamentally different from most open source projects I am aware of,
and could go bad when considered with my previous point.

As far as I am concerned, the following would be enough to resolve any issues:
  -  having one (or more) persons outside any company interest (e.g.
Chuck, Pauli) with a veto.
  -  no significant feature goes in without a review from people
outside the organization it is coming from.

David