Revised RFC 1 - Need Comments

[Howard Butler]

At 12:27 PM 10/12/2006, Daniel Morissette wrote:
>I'm not too keen on the 2 year term either. My main concern is that 
>continuity is important for the direction of a project to remain 
>consistent. If over a couple of election cycles most of the PSC ends 
>up being replaced then you lose all track of the historical 
>background and nobody will know the reasons why things were done one 
>way or another and you end up with the new PSC members making 
>decisions that may be contrary to the original design goals.

I don't think anyone expects that scenario to play out.  It isn't in 
the community's best interest to have that happen.  Also, not being 
on the PSC doesn't mean you can't still be a developer, or answer 
questions on the maillist, write documentation, or file well-detailed 
bugs in bugzilla... it is merely your punishment for doing those 
things so much :)

My idea with the term is that it gives the community an opportunity 
to *ensure* continuity by packing the PSC with members that reflect 
its goals, development ideas, and design philosophy.  In my opinion, 
this works both ways -- people are here because the project already 
reflects those things.


>Is it any good for MapServer if Steve is not re-elected on the PSC 
>when his term is up, or for GDAL if Frank is not re-elected on the 
>GDAL PSC if that PSC was setup to work this way?
>
>Why would Frank or Steve not be re-elected you ask? With an open 
>community vote, what would prevent a large group (or even an 
>unfriendly proprietary corporation) from filing a bunch of 
>non-anonimous votes and taking over the PSC over a couple of election cycles?

I think the community would react rather poorly to a hostile 
takeover.  It's open source software, and the fork alternative is 
always out there.  It's messy, but this scenario has played out a 
number of times in a number of (smaller, generally) projects.  The 
project always has that risk, no matter which governance model is 
chosen, and that's the number one driving factor in keeping open 
source projects honest.


>I guess I'm with Frank and have a preference for the self-perpetuating-cabal.

I have a preference for the MapServer community perpetuating the cabal.

Howard