Re: Maintainer policy for GDB

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:51:01 -0800
> From: Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>
> Cc: Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com>, gdb@sourceware.org
> 
> On 11/18/05, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > In other words, if responsibility doesn't come with some unique
> > authority, who will want such a responsibility?
> 
> People who take pleasure in being helpful to the project, and to Free
> software.  People who want to establish a name for themselves as a
> reliable contributor.  There are a lot of reasons people contribute to
> Free software projects; I don't think the pursuit of authority is even
> a particularly common motivation.

I know all about motivation to contribute, but I'm talking about
something slightly different.

It goes without saying that the responsibility should be taken
voluntarily, not forced upon the volunteer.  But even a volunteer gets
some unique authority that is part of the job she's taken.  For
example, in projects where there's a head maintainer, only that person
gets to make some decisions, and that person's agreement is needed to
do certain things.  Here you have an example of a contributing
volunteer who, as part of her job, gets authority not shared by
others.

While pursuit of authority is not the most important reason people
will accept responsibility, some people do enjoy it.  We shouldn't
request the volunteers to be too altruistic, I think.