Re: New MI maintainer

["Jim Blandy" <jimb@red-bean.com>]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 9:20 AM, Thomas Dineen <tdineen@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>    From my observations the attitudes expressed
>  in this thread are NOT positive for the Open Source
>  Movement. I would suggest that your movement would
>  benefit from more openness and democracy.

The procedure for making decisions that GDB has followed here is
common among successful Open Source projects, with minor variations,
and has been for a long time.  For example, the Subversion project,
which many consider to be well-run, operates in exactly this way: the
group of "full committers" watches out for people to invite to become
full committers, discusses possibilities and reaches decisions in
private, makes invititations privately, and announces accepted
invitations publicly.  See also the book _Producing Open Source
Software_, available on-line at http://producingoss.com/.

In Free software, your ultimate protection from demagogues comes from
the license itself: if a project is badly run but the software is
valued, people who can run the project better will fork it, and
compete for developers with the badly-run project.  If the original
project was, in fact, poorly run, it will eventually die off.  In some
cases, the old project gets re-absorbed into the new one, thus
effecting a change in leadership without coercion.