[openbeos] Re: FalterCon 2007 Permissions - Official Response

  • From: Oliver Tappe <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 18:21:35 +0200

Hi Andrew,

please take a deep breath and reconsider. Your post is coming across pretty 
strong and I personally believe that it has left the path of constructive 
discussion.

Everything below is just my personal view, of course.

On 2007-08-05 at 14:19:28 [+0200], Andrew McCall <andrew.mccall@xxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> On 05/08/07, Michael Lotz <mmlr@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hello Everyone
> >
> > I just have a problem with the attitude here. We made a decision and
> > this should be accepted. Of course it may seem unpleasant for some and
> > cause frustration to others, but if the decision is simply undermined
> > by the community this causes frustration on both sides. And quite
> 
> Here lies the problem with Open Source projects.
> 
> Who's to say it should be accepted? Where do you draw the line between
> the community and the project admins, or even the people who
> participate on email lists giving feedback and opinions, or the people
> who organize conferences or provide artwork?

Drawing that line is pretty easy, actually. Just like many other open source 
projects, Haiku has established a decisive body (the admin team) which is 
responsible for steering the project. If you are part of that team, you have 
your direct say in the decision making. If not, you are invited to state your 
view on this list and you may manage to influence one or the other admin. 
However, once a decision has been made, it should be accepted.
Living with decisions made by other people isn't easy, no matter if you are a 
member of the admin team or not. I had been outvoted several times in the 
past, but what is there I could do apart from accepting the democratic 
decision of that body? Yes, one can whine about it being wrong, but that is 
not going to help much.

> Is their input worth any less than code put forth by Axel, yourself etc. ?

How do you compare contributions? By weight or by size? ;-)

The simple fact is: every member of the admin team has one vote, everyone 
else has none. That's how it works, just like in a representative democracy: 
you can try to convice people that are entitled to partake in decisions, but 
you shouldn't bully them.

> Any vote by the admin team is supposed to reflect what the community
> want.

Surely not, as there is no such thing as the *community*, there are just 
people interested in haiku. We'd have to organize votes throughout the 
community, which just doesn't scale.

>  Koki, Bryan V Mike Sum et. al ARE the community - did you count
> their votes?

Nope, these individuals are *part of* the community, they do not constitute 
the community, of course. I, for one, am part of that same community, too. 
And my view happens to differ from theirs.

> Would you prefer it if the code was forked?

Sorry, that question carries inappropriate subtext, so I won't answer it.

> My _personal_ opinion is exactly the opposite of yours.  I think there
> should be a Haiku developer VMware image, I would like to use it
> myself at work and think it would be a great way of keeping up with
> the current build rather than building the whole OS.  The stability of
> the very early Develop Releases of BeOS was sometimes worse than
> Haiku, yet Be, Inc. still got their OS out.  Ship-early-ship often.
> At a Linux conference, it can only help.

Yes, that is your valuable view, and you are not alone with it, but a 
decision has been reached now and any further lamenting is pretty much in 
vain.

> I do see the value of protecting the Haiku "image" though, but I feel
> its being miss-used.  I think people, including the project admins are
> under the impression that when Haiku is released its going to be like
> a major FireFox release, or like a OpenOffice.org release.  Its not.

Well, I personally am not under that impression. So you are right, it's not. 
But I fail to see what this has to do with the point being discussed. While 
the total count of individuals noticing a new FireFox release is much higher, 
the same principles still hold.

> Most people don't care about Haiku.  Its going to take YEARS to get to
> the stage where you can talk to your average techie and mention Haiku
> before he knows what it is.  In the meantime, we need all the
> developers, artists, and geek-users who don't mind a crash we can get.
> 
> I think the questions that that needs asking RIGHT NOW isn't if things
> like this should be allowed or not allowed.  It should be why is the
> community so polarized on their opinions.  Get that sorted and you
> won't need an admin team.

Yeah, have you noticed that your last sentence is asking *others* (not 
yourself) to get that community sorted? Do you happen to have a good recipe 
for that, so we can start executing?

cheers,
        Oliver

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