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

[Matthew Brett]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>> 1) I very much agree that governance can make or break a project. However,
>> the actual governance approach often ends up making less difference than the
>> people involved.
>>
>> 2) While the FreeBSD and XFree examples do point to some real problems with
>> the "core" model it seems that there are many other projects that are using
>> it quite successfully.

I was just rereading the complaints about the 'core' structure from
high-level NetBSD project leaders:

"[the "core" and "board of directors"] teams are dysfunctional because
they do not provide leadership: all they do is act reactively to
requests from users and/or to resolve internal disputes. In other
words: there is no initiative nor vision emerging from these teams
(and, for that matter, from anybody)." [1]

"There is no high-level direction; if you ask "what about the problems
with threads" or "will there be a flash-friendly file system", the
best you'll get is "we'd love to have both" -- but no work is done to
recruit people to code these things, or encourage existing developers
to work on them." [2]

I imagine we will have to reconcile ourselves to similar problems, if
we adopt the same structures.

Cheers,

Matthew

[1] http://julipedia.meroh.net/2013/06/self-interview-after-leaving-netbsd.html
[2] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html