Peter Donald wrote:
I am speaking as a complete outsider to this problem, because I'm not a contributor (except the odd bug report or so) but also as someone, who is interested in the proliferation of Avalon.
There some like me who can no longer contribute. I am still not really clear on why my cvs access was removed - however it was and is unlikely to be returned. It seems like Nicola has decided that I no longer have other rights such as voting rights. So there is little chance of influence there. All in all my ability to contribute has been mostly removed.
In OpenSource projects there is usually a "order of merit". He, who contributes much of the code in one area, is fairly automatically a committer and an important decision-maker. If that person doesn't agree with the rest of the community and the differences are unbridgeable (as it seems here), then a split of the community results. No amount of discussion is going to change that.
Should that happen to Avalon or Phoenix, then the users will decide the whole issue and no amount of voting (whether unanimous or majority) can change that. The users will either stay or they will go with the important contributor, depending on where they feel "their" investment is maintained best.
So, dear developers, if you can't agree, then we users will decide ;-)
On a small level this "forking of communities" happens every day. People leave a project and join another one, that's fairly normal. If the idea as such is viable, then the project will live. Look at fop and how their roster of major developers has changed over the years. Other projects, which do not have enough appeal, die, when the major contributors leave - and perhaps it should be that way :)
Ulrich
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