Board to vote on the mantra requirement

[Laurențiu Nicola]

> the idea that "user has an account with $somebody is evidence that they are not a bad actor" fundamentally does not make sense

And yet this was exactly criterion based on which I've sent the mantra to hundreds of people: a GitHub account showing their email address.

Over the past couple of years, I've probably sent thousands of responses to mantra-request. I'm pretty certain I have not stopped a single spammer. I did stop a bunch of people with no public online identity. It's not a contribution I'm proud of.

> passport

That term reminds me of Microsoft Passport, which wasn't that great, was it? People aren't logging in with Gmail because it's their passport, but rather because it's convenient to remember one less password. It's not a statement, it's just convenience.

> arguments for keeping the mantra

First, I'd like to point out that the staunchest supporters of the mantra are not responding to ~300 requests each month. I did that for a long time. I finally cracked when, after asking a 500th user to upload the source code of a QGIS plugin (instead of a ZIP), I got instead a Python file called "source code" added to the repo.

Thanks to Richard for picking this up.

> I think the QGIS Plugins Repository service could just accept whatever passport is provided by the companies QGIS PSC decides to trust

It already accepts GItHub, GitLab and Gmail.

> older arguments about requiring a domain to get an account

I'd hate this. Not everyone has or needs a domain. I've never seen such a high bar to enter a community, especially one that calls itself "Open".

> older arguments not wanting to get more issues filed

This is just as bad as stalebot.

> older arguments about the sense of a community

Sure, a community would be nice, but how many of the thousands who registered to publish their plugins or to report a PostGIS issue are really part of the community? They uploaded their plugin or filed their issue, and none of us saw them again.


So yeah, I don't think I would miss the mantra too much if it went away.

Laurentiu