Being member of PMC / PPMC seems to be the kind of Voting Rank I was
describing.. except it is more bureaucratic / social based rather than
result based.. because it depends on the membership rather than
overall lines of code added to the project.. on the other hand input
to the project may be the door opener to PMC :-)
There are committers and PMC members. The former are purely technical
in there role and the latter have additional management commitments
and have binding votes. In order to be either, you have to have an
established track record of contribution to the project.
For this reason, the ASF considers itself a meritocracy:
https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#meritocracy
https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/success-at-apache-meritocracy
I know you are familiar with the Linux Foundation from your prior work
with the Zephyr. The Linux Foundation and the ASF are both
not-for-profit organizations, but they different significantly in their
legal organizations. I forget the non-project corporation types but
basically, the Linux Foundation is dedicated to free business
development. Projects are controlled through management teams composed
of businesses, usually by paying a fee and getting power within the
project based upon the amount that the business paid (Silver, Gold,
Platinum levels for example).
The ASF is a different kind of not-for-profit organization, it is
dedicated to the people who use the software project, not to
businesses. So for the ASF it is the user community that matters, not
the businesses that use the software. An ASF project is controlled by
individuals in the community that have made significant contributions to
the project. You will often hear ASF people say "Community over code."
(I personally like code more that people, but that is just me).
