Re: [gentoo-project] Groups under the Council or Foundation: the structure & processes thereof

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 4:24 PM, Matthias Maier <tamiko@g.o> wrote:
>
> I cannot stop the feeling that this is some sort of personal grudge, or
> disagreement with council and comrel that is tried to be fought out that
> way.
>
> Is it that way?
>

Well, I can't speak for the motives of all.  Certainly there are some
fairly personal disagreements over recent comrel cases getting mixed
in.  However, I think there are a lot of other motivations as well:

1.  The Trustees have their own mandate to uphold the principles of
the Foundation, so it is natural for them to be concerned about such
things.
2.  Personal disputes are the sorts of things that do tend to blow up
into lawsuits, and not just long threads (though this is far more
common for employee relationships).
3.  Trying to simplify our metastructure has been an area of interest
for a few people for a long time, so any question of governance is
going to be an opportunity for these things to come up.
4.  Bystanders who have an interest in Gentoo are going to be
concerned about its health, and how such things work.
5.  Anybody subject to Comrel is going to care about how Comrel works.
It wields a lot of power, and is fairly closed, and by its nature it
invites questions.

So, while I don't know that everybody is looking at this purely from a
Gentoo-centric standpoint, I am not at all surprised by the amount of
drama this has created.  I tend to think that we need to collect the
best ideas, and then figure out what to do with them.  Some are just
easy drop-in tweaks.  The bigger changes need to be done thoughtfully
if at all.  It is also somewhat important to try to judge the true
level of interest.  5-10 of us might write 500 posts in this thread
but that doesn't necessarily mean that most devs want to see things
change.

-- 
Rich