I can accept those reasons for new persons in charge. What about vetoed code and adding a new codebase? I can see the giving up control as a reason to escalate things to Consensus from Majority, but I'm not seeing the reason for these 2.
On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Sean Busbey <bus...@cloudera.com> wrote: > > > > On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 12:19 PM, John Vines <vi...@apache.org> wrote: > >> So, I pseudo got an explanation for the second point in the CtR >> discussion, >> so I'm going to withdraw that comment. However, I would still appreciate >> an >> explanation for initial paragraph. >> >> >> On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 12:32 PM, John Vines <vi...@apache.org> wrote: >> >> > The majority of the reasoning I read in the bylaws thread justifying why >> > bylaw changes should be majority and not consensus seemed to spiral >> around >> > "We don't want someone to be able to torpedo the vote". Can someone who >> > held this opinion clarify why this is unacceptable for a bylaw change >> but >> > acceptable for adopting a new code base, a new committer, a new pmc >> member, >> > or a new pmc chair? Primarily I was looking at these compared to bylaw >> > changes when I made decided that bylaws should have the same level of >> > approval. I feel that having these items as consensus by bylaws as >> majority >> > seems inconsistent. >> > >> > > N.b. I don't subscribe to the "we don't want someone to torpedo the vote" > concern. (btw I would rephrase it as "we don't want casual or obstinate > participants to deadlock the community.") > > One big difference between our bylaws and e.g. new committer, new pmc > member, etc. is that after the vote passes we effectively give up control > over that decision. As mentioned during the early work on the bylaws, only > the ASF can remove people. > > For comparison, if there's a problem with the bylaws we can amend them > ourselves with an additional vote. > > I happen to think that Majority Approval leads to better consensus > building in well functioning communities. As Benson mentioned in his > earlier email, it's important for the majority opinion to avoid running > roughshod over the minority opinion. I think well functioning communities > take this to heart and work to moderate their positions. By comparison, the > nature of vetoes in Consensus Approval can lead people to squabbling over > the legitimacy of a particular veto on technical grounds. > > At the end of the day, wether the vote is Majority or Consensus won't > matter. Either of them can be abused should a segment of the community > decide to and we'll be faced with very negative outcomes regardless. More > important, to me, is that we not get too distracted in the process of > deciding which to use. > > -- > Sean >
