[OSGeo-Discuss] Tales from a Benevolent Dictator

[Moritz Lennert]

On 15/05/16 14:40, Marco Afonso wrote:
> Hi Anita,
>
> Aha! So there is a ponderation weight on software quality evaluation AND
> project organization evaluation.
>
> So you can exclude an open source software with high quality if their
> organization evaluation is low.
>
> For me that seems wrong. A software on a public repository is only
> limited by it's licence terms, or unlimited at all. :)

But the discussion is not about whether the software should be in a 
public repository or not, or what the licence term should be. The 
discussion is about what the meaning of the "OSGeo project" label is.

I don't think anyone has questioned the quality of the software, here. 
However, one of the aims of labeling a project an OSGeo project is to 
give a certain level of guarantee to potential users that this software 
_project_ respects a series of criteria that are considered important to 
ensure a long-term sustainability of that project. Putting one person's 
name in the statutes of a project and designating that person as the one 
who has ultimate decision rights (even if these decisions are always 
based on quality criteria), leaves the question of what would happen if 
that person lands under the proverbial bus.

A more collective governance structure is seen by many as more 
sustainable in the long run. Similar debates have gone on for ages in 
Debian, for example, about team-based maintaining of packages vs 
individual maintainers.

What I personally haven't really understood, yet, is what the rasdaman 
community is really afraid of. If the community works as well as 
described, why would the creation of a PSC-like structure create such 
problems ?

Moritz