[Incubator] Rasdaman as a 'Benevolent dictatorship' Project: was [rasdaman-dev] patch quality

[Even Rouault]

Selon Andrea Aime <andrea.aime at geo-solutions.it>:

> On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Even Rouault
> <even.rouault at mines-paris.org>wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I couldn't resist to interfere into this topic. To my opinion, most OSGeo
> > projects current operate under the "Benevolent Dictatorship" model, except
> > that
> > they call it, in a more political correct fashion, a "Project
> > Steering/Management Committee" and it is made of several individuals, with
> > equal
> > rights and known procedures. And, in case of hard disputes, there is an
> > individual who is more equal to others, and he's called the dictator...
> > ahem no,
> > the "Chair"...
> >
>
> Except that a chair can be overruled by the rest of the PSC, a benevolent
> dictator
> has full powers if he wants to exercise them instead (even if normally he
> would graciously
> listen to the rest of the community).
>
> For example, in the GeoServer PSC the chair (Chris Holmes) is just a tie
> breaker, the position
> has otherwise no special powers. We do however have a fallback, if the PSC
> stops to function
> the control of the project goes back to OpenPlans.

To write my email, I was re-reading GDAL RFC 1 (
http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/rfc1_pmc ) and it mentions "The Chair is the
ultimate adjudicator if things break down.". This isn't really clear to me what
the limits of this remark are, but normally this doesn't indeed imply having
more votes than other PSC members.

But, if one lets my provocative initial email aside, the idea is that the PSC
generally tries to operate with a broad concensus. To put it differently, the
Benevolent Dictator is the PSC in its whole.