Hello community, I care enough about Haiku to want to add my two cents to this
matter:
It seems to me that because Haiku has no published protocol/set of rules on how
to judge conflicts like the one currently active (at least not that I know of),
the first priority should be to set this up.
Now that an actual conflict had to make the need for such a thing clear, it
would (IMHO) make sense to let any decision(s) that date from a period without
rules/ protocols become temporary until such rules/protocols are established
and published (after being agreed upon by a representative group of people, of
course).
After that, the whole situation can be judged again according to those
rules/protocols.
You may even say that turning this into a temporary situation is too unfair and
therefore all access should be restored and all previous '-1' or '+1' votes
should become invalid until the rules/protocols are in place.
Ideally these rules/protocols should be established in a period without any
active conflicts, but that situation has obviously become unattainable. Haiku
can't afford to not set them up, however.
I think the lack of rules/protocol for conflicts is the larger, more
fundamental problem compared to the actual conflict.
To reduce any risk that the rules/protocols that are to be written up will be
affected by the current conflict, it would be best if the main players in this
conflict don't take part in setting up those rules/protocols.
I don't know how things are arranged in other open source projects, but maybe
inspiration can be taken from one or more of them. It may save work if (parts
of) an approach that may be found could also be applied to Haiku.
It's regrettable that right now nothing is fully clear and/or formally
established about quite fundamental things like:
- what does a ban consist of
- is a ban temporary or definitive
- how many warnings should precede it
- who issues such warnings, in what way and after which processes
- should a definitive ban be preceded by one or more temporary bans, and if so:
how many and how is this number decided
- can the person in question appeal against a ban and where
- when voting, how many + or - votes are needed (in general / for each
situation)
- how long does a voting session last (in general / for each situation)
etc. etc.
(this list isn't complete, it's just what came up in my head in a short period)
I think that the handling of this case (when leading to workflow-affecting
decisions) should therefore wait until clear and extensive enough
rules/protocols are active and published.
It's always better if a decision about oneself that was made by others is based
upon a set of established and published rules and definitions that anybody can
check and read into.
Even if you don't agree with the decision, you at least have a clearer idea of
what it's based on, which makes it less hard to swallow.
