Re: [gentoo-project] Representation of Gentoo on third-party platforms

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 9:40 PM, William L. Thomson Jr.
<wlt-ml@××××××.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, November 12, 2016 9:16:09 PM EST Rich Freeman wrote:
>
>> What would you prefer that the Council spend their time on?  The main
>> purpose of the Council is to deal with cases where individual projects
>> aren't able to resolve things on their own, conflicts between
>> projects, and appeals from Comrel/QA.  It is a democratically elected
>> governance body.
>
> I am seriously in major shock at your statement. Coming from a Council
> member... I think you have a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of the
> Gentoo Council. I am flat out flabbergasted.

My view of the purpose of Council is also something I've been
completely up-front about in my various manifestos, for reasons I'll
elaborate on.

>
> Things like that, ideas should be produced from Council members and set out as
> the direction for Gentoo. Then motivate volunteers to help take Gentoo in said
> direction.

You don't need to be on the Council to come up with ideas for where to
take Gentoo.  That's basically the whole point of our meta-structure.

If you want to make Java better, then just do it.  You don't need to
wait for the Council to have a vision for Java.  If you have a vision
for Java then run with it.  If you run into some kind of conflict,
then sure the Council can step in and try to tweak things so that
everybody can maximize their contributions.

Why do you think we have three different udev implementations?  Do you
think we'd be better off if the Council picked one and then told those
who care about the others to go create a fork?  The whole point of
Gentoo is that we create choices for our users.

The goal is to give everybody freedom to be leaders as much as
possible, not to have developers sit around waiting for orders from on
high.  People contribute where they choose, not where somebody else
thinks they should be contributing.  If there aren't any Java packages
in Gentoo it is because nobody thinks it is worth their time to invest
in them, not because some leader said that people shouldn't be working
on them.

Now, sometimes people will have differing opinions on how something
ought to be done and there is a need to set a global policy.
Generally speaking the Council tries to take an approach of least
interference in such cases, finding ways to enable everybody do
accomplish their goals while giving way enough so that others can do
so as well.  How else do you think we became the only distro around
where both Systemd and OpenRC are essentially first-class citizens,
along with udev and eudev?

You may see this as a lack of vision, but I see it as the opposite.
THIS IS the vision.  One where we can have leaders at all levels.

And of course Council members lead initiatives.  But the reality is
that when we do it we're really just doing it in our capacity as
individuals.  Sometimes we decide something needs to be done and seek
a volunteer among our ranks to try to lead it.  However, if somebody
who wasn't on the Council was seeking such a role we probably wouldn't
hesitate to encourage them.  I've been tinkering with a Copyright
Policy which has come up recently, and I'll be giving it a bit more
attention, but the reality is that others can of course contribute to
it, or even try to take us in a different direction.

And leadership is hardly limited to developers/etc.  Those raising
concerns with the Cormel process are essentially demonstrating
leadership in doing so, and I think that this will lead to
improvements.  If most developers don't think they go far enough then
they can elect others to take them further.

If somebody finds themselves asking the question "why isn't somebody
in leadership addressing foo?" then they should start by asking
themselves "why aren't I addressing foo?"  If you have an itch,
scratch it!  That's how just about everything gets done in the FOSS
world, at least in community driven projects.

-- 
Rich