[Numpy-discussion] Governance model request

[Nathaniel Smith]

Hi Bryan,

I understand where you're coming from, but I'd appreciate it if we
could keep the discussion on a less visceral level? Nobody's personal
integrity is being impugned, but it's the nature of this kind of
governance discussion that we have to consider unlikely-and-unpleasant
hypotheticals. It's like when you talk to a lawyer about a contract or
a will or whatever: they'll make you think about all kinds of horrible
possibilities, not because any of them are likely, but because sooner
or later *something* will go wrong, and the point of having a
contract/will/governance document is to provide some framework to
handle whichever unlikely edge case does arise.

And the other purpose of this kind of framework is to avoid the
*perception* (whether justified or not) of these kinds of conflicts of
interest -- if not handled well then this can easily scare away
volunteers, contributions from other companies, etc. Obviously you
know Travis and Continuum well as an employee there, but to most
people without that personal connection, Continuum is just a large
corporate entity with unknown motives. Imagine if instead of Continuum
we were talking about it was Google or RandomAggressiveStartup -- some
company that you didn't have any personal connection or insight into.
For someone in this position, it's not unreasonable to want more of a
reassurance that things will work out then just being asked to trust
that the CEO is personally committed to not being evil and they can
trust him.

Also, in these messages you seem to be working from a framework where
people working in good faith will always agree, and so any suggestion
of a possible conflict of interest can only arise through bad faith.
But this isn't true. Is it really so difficult to imagine that, say,
Continuum and Enthought might at some point have conflicting needs for
numpy, or for Continuum's vision of the future of numpy could be
less-than-perfectly-representative with every bit of numpy's entire
giant userbase? Continuum is a company that has in the past submitted
rather obscure patches to numpy that AFAICT are used exclusively by a
particular contracting customer (e.g. [1]), and that is currently
investing a substantial multiple of numpy's development budget on
building a direct competitor to numpy.

To emphasize: I personally am not concerned by these facts -- we did
merge that patch I linked, and there's no animosity between the numpy
and dynd teams -- but reasonable people could reasonably be concerned
that tricky situations might emerge in the future, and I've talked to
plenty of people who are nervous about Continuum's influence in
general. And with my numpy developer hat on, I don't even care which
"side" is right, that's irrelevant to me, because my concern is with
providing a space where both "sides" feel comfortable working
together. This is why it's crucial that numpy-the-project be clearly
distinguishable as an independent entity that is beholden only to its
own community: it's *exactly because* we *value* the contribution of
companies like Continuum, and want to be able to freely foster those
relationships without creating suspicion and bad blood.

Also to emphasize: none of this means that Travis can't be on the
steering council -- I think that's a more complex issue that I'll
address separately. All I'm saying is that pretending that you aren't
going to reassure people by pretending this elephant isn't in the
room, or by taking a reasonable set of concerns and aggressively
turning them into a referendum on individual people's integrity.

Finally, can I point out... anyone who has some wariness around the
possible influence of financial interests on the community (whether
justified or not!) is in particular not going to be reassured if you
keep aggressively attempting to shut down any perceived criticism of
*your own employer*. I know that your paycheck is not dictating your
opinions, and probably the hypothetical people I'm talking about are
being totally unfair to you for even considering such a thing, but...
strictly as a matter of practical rhetoric, I don't think this is the
most effective way to accomplish your goals.

-n

[1] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/359


On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 11:28 PM, Bryan Van de Ven <bryanv at continuum.io> wrote:
>
>> I don't know how productive it is to dream up examples, but it's not
>
> Well, agreed, to be honest.
>
>> very hard to do.  Currently, e.g., the community is not ready to adopt
>> numba as part of the ufunc core.  But it's been stated by some that,
>
> Who are you speaking for? The entire community? Under what mandate?
>
>> with so many people running Conda, breaking the ABI is of little
>> consequence.  And then it wouldn't be much of a leap to think that numba
>> is an acceptable dependency.
>
> The current somewhat concrete proposal I am aware of involves funding cleaning up dtypes. Is there another concrete, credible proposal to make Numba a dependency of NumPy that you can refer to? If not, why are we mired in hypotheticals?
>
>> There's a broad range of Continuum projects that intersect with what
>> NumPy does: numba, DyND, dask and Odo to name a few.  Integrating them
>> into NumPy may make a lot more sense for someone from Continuum than for
>> other members of the community.
>
> May? Can you elaborate? More speculation. My own position is that these projects want to integrate with NumPy, not the converse. Regardless of my opinion, can you actually make any specific arguements, one way or the otehr? What if if some integrations actually make more sense for the community? Is this simply a dogmatic ideological position that anything whatsoever that benefits both NumPy and Continuum simultaneously is bad, on principle? That's fine, as such, but let's make that position explicit if that's all it is.
>
> Bryan
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-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org