[Numpy-discussion] Comments on governance proposal (was: Notes from the numpy dev meeting at scipy 2015)

[Chris Barker]

1) I very much agree that governance can make or break a project. However,
the actual governance approach often ends up making less difference than
the people involved.

2) While the FreeBSD and XFree examples do point to some real problems with
the "core" model it seems that there are many other projects that are using
it quite successfully.

3) at least in the XFree case, maybe the biggest issue was not the core (or
the board), but the fact that discussions and decision making process were
kept secret (and restriction to CVS, EVEN read-only) -- this does not seem
to be inherent to the "core" model at all, and not how nupy will even
operate.

4) the biggest issue numpy has faced in years is a lack of people that
can/will/do actually contribute code itself. there simply isn't a big group
f folks waiting to step up and be the president. And the "leader",
president of BDFL, etc, while primarily being a management role, needs to
be fully technically competent -- there are very few people qualified at
this point, and I suspect none of them want that job. -- in theory, one can
manage without the technical competency, but does anyone have a single
example of a successful open-source software project run by a good manager
that isn't a top technical expert? All the BDFLs I know of are absolutely
top of the heap technically.

5) Sadly, at the end of the day, democracy is often a way to make very poor
decisions.

So -- it seems there is consensus that we need to formalize the governance
of numpy. And honestly, I don't think there are any other options that
would work at this point with the current community.


And the biggest point: while forking may well demonstrate a complete
failure of the governance of a project -- it also represents a success of
open-source. In fact, when I read Mathew's history of X11 -- it seems the
biggest impediment at each stage were the efforts to make it less that
truly open-source.

-Chris


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

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