[gentoo-project] Fwd: Re: [gentoo-nfp] drobbins can be nominated as a trustee

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

What follows below is a private email between Daniel Robbins and myself back 
in 2008. It stemmed from a thread started on the Gentoo -nfp mailing list.

On other lists I was supportive of Daniel Robbins return. Failure to embrace 
him in a community he started resulted in the creation of Funtoo. About a year 
or so after the creation of Exherboo.

2007-2008 was not the best years for Gentoo, and allot that started then 
effected the project is serious ways.

Like it or not, I assume most would not. Gentoo needs serious leadership, and 
I would be for bringing back Daniel and letting him play out some ideas with a 
project he started.

Where would Android be without Google? Seriously lots of articles research and 
read lots of very good points even though Android has some serious issues 
still.

Where would the Linux Kernel be without Linus and Alan Cox?

It is also interesting as a fan of Democracy, it is not the perfect solution. 
No military is run as a Democracy for good reason. Most any organization has a 
structured head, even democratic ones. I am not sure this structural 
experiment with Gentoo has ever worked out and it was clearly never intended 
to be such.

Now form Daniel himself....

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [gentoo-nfp] drobbins can be nominated as a trustee
Date: Thursday, January 31, 2008, 1:38:28 PM EDT
From: Daniel Robbins <drobbins@××××××.org>
To: William L. Thomson Jr. <wltjr@g.o>

On 1/31/08, William L. Thomson Jr. <wltjr@g.o> wrote:
> > I also don't really feel comfortable with the concept of developers
> > voting to make decisions like this for the project. It doesn't seem to
> > yield good results or be a positive use of time, and I don't really
> > think the underlying concept is sound.
>
> Not to be argumentative or confrontational. But out of curiosity as I
> was not around the. Weren't you a participant in creating the structure
> we have now? Creation of the foundation, board of trustees, election
> process, etc.

The short answer is that I set up the Foundation, but that the
day-to-day way that the project operates now is something quite
different to what existed when I was leading the project, since these
voting mechanisms did not exist when I was Chief Architect.

I set up the Foundation and appointed trustees to run it. I did not
specify how new trustees were to be selected, to my knowledge, other
than that replacement trustees would be appointed by the existing
trustees - I think that is what is in the original and current bylaws
on file. As I understand it, the Council was created after I left the
project, as a way to fill the void of a Chief Architect by creating a
developer-elected technical committee.

Overall, I have not been supportive of developer-vote mechanisms in
the past, as these mechanisms when they were proposed during my tenure
as Chief Architect were often done with the intention of co-opting the
project because people didn't want me to run it - sometimes, because
the people proposing the democratic reforms wanted to run the project
themselves. And sometimes for what I'd describe as misguided
ideological reasons. And I did want to run it :) And I did have groups
of people like project managers, but they were "heads" of their own
projects and did not run by committee.

There were several people pressuring me to establish the Foundation at
an accelerated pace, primarily klieber, using the argument that
"Gentoo is now too big for a single person to run it." The model they
wanted was a more developer-focused democratic one where committees
oversaw critical aspects of Gentoo, and they believed that this model
was moral and just. The initial trustees included some of these
pro-democracy people, as well as others who I perceived as being
genuinely interested in advancing the causes of the Gentoo project.

After I appointed the initial set of trustees, I resigned. From what I
can tell, all the democratic institutions were created after I
resigned as Chief Architect. The big proponents of the "Democracy
Now!" movement were initially klieber, who were part of the initial
batch of ~13 trustees. After I left, it appears that ciaranm and
g2boojum were the primary ones moving this democracy concept forward,
though I could be wrong here as I wasn't around - I am primarily going
by the authorship of the Council GLEP.

I did have a pretty good balance in the initial batch of trustees, and
the majority of them were simply focused on looking out for Gentoo.
But I think that the pro-democratic committee viewpoint and anti-Chief
Architect viewpoint was the conventional wisdom of the day among many
developers, and this was what the trustees adopted as their standard
operating procedure as they started deciding how the project should
operate. Developers tended to live inside an idealistic "bubble" where
everyone tried to figure out the utopian organizational model for the
project, and "leadership" of any sort was out of fashion.

Although the fact that Seemant and I - the top two guys on the project
- were against headless committees should have counted for something.
Of course, the other side rationalized this away by claiming that we
simply wanted to hold on to power, since we happened to be the
respective heads. At that point, I was frustrated and just decided to
resign and find a way to move on with my life. It appears that Seemant
got tired of the politics and became more and more disenchanted and
distant from the project as well.

That is at least my perspective on things. In some sense I think that
the democracy people needed to have their day so that they could learn
that the ideas don't work - they were basically working to organize a
popular uprising within the project to overthrow the current power
structure. But at this point I think it's pretty clear to at least
most Gentoo users that the system these people inspired doesn't work
very well.

Anyway, not wanting to start a flame war or really start further
discussion, just answering your question from my perspective. And I
have used up all my time for Gentoo discussion for this week, so I
need to get back to real work :)

-----------------------------------------
-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.