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On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 4:35 PM Brad Teaford Cowan |
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<bradly.cowan@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> |
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> First of all, the foundation was formed in |
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> defense of the exact situation that Gentoo is facing now, as a control |
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> buffer keeping certain developers from literally taking over every |
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> aspect of the distro for their own gain. |
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This seems really odd to me. I don't think there are any signs that a |
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very small number of devs have an unusual amount of control at the |
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moment. Over the last few years we've had a reasonable amount of |
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turnover in both the Council and the Trustees. Sure, we have devs who |
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are more active than others in making proposals, and so on, but these |
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generally require approval by others. To the extent that a few key |
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team leads have more significant influence, their decisions almost |
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always can be appealed. |
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|
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Ironically the Foundation Trustees are the weaker link historically |
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when it comes to having a small number of people able to "take over." |
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At one point we only had 3 Trustees I think, and I believe two of |
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those disappeared. At that point our one remaining Trustee could have |
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probably just set himself up as benevolent dictator if desired, and |
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there was actually talk at the time about moving to that model |
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(drobbins offered to take the role as I recall - IMO without any ill |
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intent). Now, at no point did anybody do anything "bad" as far as I'm |
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aware, but I'm just saying that it could have happened. This is |
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simply because we don't have a lot of people interested in Foundation |
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work. After this crisis more people stepped up to try to prevent his |
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from happening, and since then we've always been able to keep the |
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seats fairly full, though we've still struggled with the housekeeping. |
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|
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In any case, I don't really see how the Foundation can really operate |
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as some kind of check because to the degree that the Foundation has |
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some kind of ultimate control, anybody who wanted to do something |
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"bad" could just take over the Foundation, and it would basically |
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involve the exact same work they would have to do to take over the |
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Council, except for which group they'd need to get representatives |
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onto. The voting pools for the two substantially overlap. In the |
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unlikely event of some kind of total breakdown between the developers |
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and foundation members you'd basically have one group that does all |
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the work and the other which owns the name and servers, and you'd |
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probably just end up with a fork under a new name using minimal/free |
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infra until that all got sorted out. Again, that is hypothetical and |
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pretty unlikely, especially right now, in my opinion. |
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|
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-- |
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Rich |