Re: Discussing issues

On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 09:30:09PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 08:45:24PM -0400, David Wexelblat wrote: 
> > Which is why I think the issues are completely about process, and not at all
> > about governance, and (IMHO) why we aren't making concrete progress, as
> > governance is Jim's explicitly stated, and (I think) Keith's
> > not-so-explicitly-stated fundamental issue, reading through these
> > conference-call transcripts.
> 
> I think you're missing some background on what Jim had to say.
> 
> The context Jim alludes to was a several-meeting-long discussion that
> went on in the GNOME Foundation board about who should be able to vote
> for the board. We ended up basically saying that if you felt like you
> were a contributor and could point to anything that was
> reasonably/arguably a contribution, even a small one, you could vote
> for the board. The alternative was to define in some way a "large
> enough" contribution.
> 
> There are a few points about this.
> 
> 1) I think it's perfectly reasonable to define a contributor in some
> other way that requires a specific size of contribution, and in fact
> some projects such as Debian do that, and it works fine. Jim is just
> trying to have this argument prematurely.

I am not sure i follow you exactly here, to be able to vote at debian
elections, you have to be a debian developper and becoming one is quite
a involved thing. First there is the security issues, you have to
personnaly meet a debian developper, convince him of your indentity and
exchange gpg keys to be added to the debian web of trust. Then there is
the technical requirement, you have to pass some kind of qualifying test
nowaday both on technical and on legal/open source issues, as well as to
adhere to the social contract. You have to prove yourself by working on
packages and fixing bugs before even being considered and you have to
have a debian developper as sponsor to advocate for you with your
application manager. The sponsor is supposed to follow your efforts at
packaging and evaluate your skill and potential. A just accepted debian
developper told us that the whole process toke 7 month for him.

Sure the personal contribution of a debian developper may only be to
package a few packages, i package 10 for example, but the average is
around 7-1 i think, and we don't kick out unactive developpers or such,
altough people got kicked out over abuse of debian facilities and such,
but the debian situation is different from the XFree86 one, since it is
comprissed of mostly a lot of small packages, not a huge single one.

Friendly,

Sven Luther