Re: Discussing issues

On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 05:09:41PM -0400, David Dawes wrote: 
> It's only a simple problem if everyone (or everyone that "matters")
> agrees with your world view.  I think that's a big assumption right
> there.

If I assumed you agreed, I wouldn't bother sending mail to try to
explain and back up my point of view.

> Effectively what you're talking about comes down to standards.
> Standards should come naturally from implementations and innovations,
> not the other way around.  Forcing everything to happen in one
> place only stifles innovation.  I guess it's a sign that open source
> is "growing up" that there's a sense that it now feels the need to
> tightly control the way things happen.  That sounds like a recipe
> out of the UNIX vendors' cookbook, and I fear that it will lead to
> another "consortium" with self-interest in slowing things down.
> Different name, different faces, but instantly recognisable
> nonetheless.
> 

Not at all. I think you've seen my many mails arguing strongly against
any repeat of X.org. I'm with you 100% on that.

If you look at other large projects: Apache, GNOME, KDE, Linux - those
clearly are not consortiums, have tons of innovation, and have rapid
progress. They each have hundreds of volunteer developers and only
dozens if that of company-employed developers. They are not "tightly
controlled," as I think is pretty clear to anyone participating in the
day-to-day chaos. ;-)

The ideal is a functional, scalable organization that lets the free
software world compete effectively with proprietary software. There
are well-established ways to organize a project that are loose enough
to scale but organized enough to move in a semicoordinated direction.

There are many examples of consortiums *not* working effectively.  As
I said in an earlier thread, I am thoroughly opposed to any
arrangement that lets people buy control, because it distorts the
long-term right technical decisions, which in the end undermines even
those who bought the control.

Standards, as I've posted in earlier threads, should be a bit of
polish at the end, not something you do in advance.

Havoc