[Numpy-discussion] Comments on governance proposal (was: Notes from the numpy dev meeting at scipy 2015)

Matthew Brett matthew.brett at gmail.com
Thu Aug 27 05:22:32 EDT 2015


Hi,

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 10:15 AM, Bryan Van de Ven <bryanv at continuum.io> wrote:
>
>> On Aug 27, 2015, at 9:36 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> So, in answer to your question, it's difficult to know if a particular
>> governance model is successful.   It isn't enough that a project has
>> lasted, or is still active, because there are so many factors in play.
>>  On the other hand, I think it is possible to point to models that
>> have a tendency to fail in particular ways, and the by-invitation
>> meritocratic 'core' group (I think this is close to the 'steering
>> committee' in our current draft) is the model that failed for NetBSD
>> and XFree86, with a particular pattern of poor or absent
>> accountability and lack of project vision.
>
> Anecdotes about two projects is not compelling evidence of anything unless you can also point to a comparison of the corresponding success rate. Two failures out of three is suggestive. Two failures out of three hundred is significantly less interesting. More useful would be  actual details of an alternative proposal or pointers to examples of alternative arrangements that could be modeled.
>

Unfortunately, I don't think we have much choice but to do our best in
sifting through the anecdotal evidence we have available, weak and
contradictory as it is.   Successful forks in large projects are
pretty rare, and as I was arguing before, they are particularly useful
as evidence about governance models.

In the case of the 'core' model, we have some compelling testimony
from someone with a great deal of experience:

"""
Much of this early structure (CVS, web site, cabal ["core" group],
etc.) was copied verbatim by other open source (this term not being in
wide use yet) projects -- even the form of the project name and the
term "core". This later became a kind of standard template for
starting up an open source project. [...] I'm sorry to say that I
helped create this problem, and that most of the projects which
modeled themselves after NetBSD (probably due to its high popularity
in 1993 and 1994) have suffered similar problems. FreeBSD and XFree86,
for example, have both forked successor projects (Dragonfly and X.org)
for very similar reasons.
"""

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html

Cheers,

Matthew



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