Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 21:55:30 -0500 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: dillon@'s commit bit: I object Message-ID: <20030205025530.GA17078@papagena.rockefeller.edu> In-Reply-To: <20030205021134.GO12525@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > This incident has generated enough traffic > already. I've counted a total of over 500 messages on this subject > already, not including the stuff on slashdot. Wow. So -chat is minor stuff (around 100 on the topic so far). <$0.02> I think FreeBSD is not and should not be a democracy, and those non-committers who want to direct the project or influence core's decisions are unrealistic. Those who make demands are worse than that. Perhaps the elements of democracy introduced in the last few years have changed people's ideas of how it works: nobody would dream of demanding things from Theo de Raadt, or Linus Torvalds, or claiming to those people that just because they use his stuff on a daily basis they have a right to tell him what to do (as opposed to offering suggestions, which we all can do in a civil manner). But somehow people (on this list, at least) seem to think they can do that with FreeBSD's core -- maybe because no single member of core is as famous/notorious as the names I cited. Committers can vote for core, and as a non-committer, I think that's ample. It's ridiculous to say a system administrator should have a say in controlling the project's direction just because he uses FreeBSD daily. By that reckoning, I should be represented on my toothbrush manufacturer's board. I don't want to vote, and in projects like this, I don't believe in excessive democracy. Look at Debian -- one of the most democratic projects around, development moves at the speed of treacle. By contrast, look at phoenix (the web browser) -- they've closed their development process to a few well-chosen insiders, and in a matter of months they've produced a browser with the best features of Mozilla, with the same code base, but vastly faster and leaner. FreeBSD's team is still doing a great job, on the whole. If a significant fraction of the other committers truly believe that dillon was on balance a hindrance and not a help, they were right to remove his commit bit. I don't particularly care to know the inside story, and I apologize for this thread (I didn't start it, but two of my posts did get linked on Slashdot's front page, so I guess I can take some of the blame). Whether they could have done it more "nicely" I don't know -- well, they tried to keep it quiet, which was nice of them, and if it weren't for our pet troll they may have succeeded. Since then, the statements they've made are well-mannered, and explain things quite adequately as far as I'm concerned. Now lets get back to improving the system... </$0.02> - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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