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| ▲ | hobofan 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > there is no model for replacing poor governance Do you have any model to propose? Because most democratic models you would see for country governance (to which you drew parallels) rely on some key characteristics that don't apply to open source governance, making them not really transferable. | | |
| ▲ | layer8 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Debian is an important open-source project that has had codified democratic governance for over quarter of a century now: https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution | | |
| ▲ | JoshTriplett 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | One property Debian has, which most projects don't have, is a very clearly established electorate to enfranchise. A few projects have a clear set of members. Most projects don't; they have contributors of code/documentation/triage/community/etc, but no clear delineation of who is or should be an enfranchised member of the project. Often, projects don't end up defining this until they need it as part of establishing some preferred form of governance. | | |
| ▲ | hobofan 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > A few projects have a clear set of members. Exactly. I'm not too versed in political theory, but one thing from my perception that provides coherence/continuity in nations is the immobility of participants (for better or worse of the individual). E.g. if you have 70/30 election outcome you still have to factor in the needs of the 30% as they may provide important economic functions and can't just leave on election loss. In contrast, in an open source project, even if you can clearly delineate membership and based on that voting rights for a democratic process there is very little preventing the "losers" from forking (it almost entirely comes down to brand). The outcome of that would just be an empty brand shell with a good chunk of their contribution activity gone. |
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| ▲ | edent 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most organisation (in my country at least) have a written set of objectives and a legal structure which diffuses power. Any co-op, limited company, charitable association, etc can provide a good model - depending on the nature of the project. As I say, it is probably overkill for most OSS projects. But once you get to a certain size, I think it is obvious that you need a way to ensure the project's longevity. The death or disgrace of a CEO rarely destroys a company. There's a board their to temper their behaviour, a structure to ensure succession, and (most importantly) a set of expectations upon which their community can rely. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it. I'm not even suggesting it is the perfect way to do it. But I think it is better than hoping the BDFL doesn't implode. | | |
| ▲ | hartator 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Non-profit entity has usually more drama. And, you can still be “dictator” of a non-profit. | |
| ▲ | paulryanrogers 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sadly plenty of boards are filled with CEO sycophants, so even that model is not immune. |
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| ▲ | tracker1 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sure there is... Forking and convincing a significant portion of users and contributors to move with you. This happened with iojs... Which is where Node as an org today came from. It happened with xfree86 to xorg... It also fails plenty... I'm the the, you are not entitled to someone else's work. Make your own, or if the license permits, create your own fork... And if you lack the technical ability, sucks to be you. | |
| ▲ | msh 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is a model, it’s called forking the code. | | |
| ▲ | tremon 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Forking the code fractures the community. The discussion at hand focuses on the community, not the code. | | |
| ▲ | cortesoft 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you feel like you need to fork the code, the community is already fractured. If the community agrees with you that the original author is doing things wrong, and your new approach is better, they will move with you to the fork. If the rest of the community doesn't agree with you, they will stay. If some stay and some go, it means only some of them agreed with you. That's the thing about open source - you don't actually have to form a consensus. You can split off whenever you want. | | |
| ▲ | munificent 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > you don't actually have to form a consensus. You can split off whenever you want. This is true and is a key property of open source. But it's also true that network effects and economies of scale are key for how open source projects provide value to their users. Those effects mean that the value an open source project provides to its community is often super-linear relative to the number of users. A concrete example: If someone writes a blog post about how to use some feature, every other user of the feature can benefit from it. But also every user can potentially write this kind of documentation. So the value people provide through documentation is very roughly quadratic in the number of people reading and writing docs. Because value like that scales super-linearly with the number of people in the ecosystem, breaking a community in two can result in less total value even if the total number of users of both communities put together is the same. If you fork and the forks diverge, now a given bit of documentation may only be relevant to one side of the fork. A given person writing some docs may documenting things that are only true for one fork. |
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| ▲ | tracker1 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So does trying to unseat leadership.. forking is just more honest and takes more effort. | |
| ▲ | dmitrygr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Until such a time when my compiler learns to take "the community" as input and still produce working binaries as output, things will remain all about the code. C'est la vie. |
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| ▲ | dmitrygr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance poor, according to whom? | |
| ▲ | ktallett 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But if it is someone's project, why should they have to leave if governance doesn't go the way they wish? The point of open source is sharing your work so others can use it and edit it. They have done their part and they maintain it as they choose whether that suits who uses it or not. I create open source projects myself, because they are applications I need or want. They are open source licensed so feel free to use them as such but my original code will develop and evolve as I choose. | | |
| ▲ | neilv 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > But if it is someone's project, why should they have to leave if governance doesn't go the way they wish? Many projects start as someone's project, but become bigger than the one person. If they keep it as one person's project, that's clear. If there are other contributors, that's less clear. If the project has a formal organization with governance, it's not the person's project. They might be grandparented in, like a vestige of a past monarchy, but the governance will evolve, to elections. The royalty will be kept for the tourism dollars. | |
| ▲ | immibis 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think this is all under the assumption that your goal is to make the project as successful as possible. If that's true, then if people think you should step down, you should. BUT can that happen? If you're trying to maximise project success, how can you also be so bad that people want you to step down? If you're not contributing but good-hearted, then you should select someone to run it day to day, but retain ultimate power in case that person turns out worse than you. |
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| ▲ | lapcat 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance. But Eugen Rochko was not replaced. He voluntarily stepped down from power because he was personally dissatisfied in the leadership role. Nobody was calling for his ouster. He could have continued as leader of Mastodon for many more years with nobody batting an eyelash. So again, Mastodon is a red herring. |
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| ▲ | fsckboy 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Wasn't the WP fight at its core about who gets to make money ... I'm not sure how moral posturing fits into this. “If you have a case where the law is clearly on your side, but the facts and justice seem to be against you, urge upon the jury the vast importance of sustaining the law. On the other hand, if the law is against you, or doubtful, and the facts show that your case is founded in justice, insist that justice be done though the heavens fall. If both the law and the facts are dead against you, in that case, talk around it, and the worse it is, the harder you pound the table.” | | |
| ▲ | btilly 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is usually shortened to: If the facts are with you, pound on the facts. Else if the law is with you, pound on the law. If neither is with you, pound on the table. |
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