[Numpy-discussion] Governance model request

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:15 PM, Bryan Van de Ven <bryanv at continuum.io> wrote:
>
>> On Sep 21, 2015, at 9:42 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>> There is ample history of such things happening in OSS history, so I think that's a fair concern, even if that has not happened for numpy yet.
>
> Specific examples to support that claim would be appreciated. In particular, examples where an OSS project was corrupted (is that the word?) by a company specifically at the hand of the project's original creator would be especially relevant.

I have no expectation that continuum will follow any of these paths,
and in most cases am not even sure what that would mean, BUT just
because I think it is useful to have a wide variety of concrete
examples to draw on -- data is good! -- there actually are *lots* of
examples of "community revolts" wresting projects from their original
founders, in a variety of corporate and non-corporate contexts. Some
examples include the nodejs->iojs fork and merge (which was about
wresting control of the project from the founding company), the
gcc->egcs fork and merge (which removed RMS's control over day-to-day
running of the project), the openoffice->libreoffice fork, the
xfree86->x.org fork (where the original core team decided to change
the license and all the developers left), the mambo->joomla fork, the
xchat->hexchat fork (triggered partially by people's annoyance at the
original developer for trying to monetize the project), ... Along
somewhat similar lines, there's also the fraught history of Qt and
Trolltech and the conflicts between the community and commercial
interests there.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org