On Oct 19, 2010, at 2:46 PM, Doug Cutting wrote:
With the exception of these two bullets, these bylaws seem equivalent to those posted by several other projects. Most projects use consensus-but-one for committer and PMC removal. Was this change intentional or accidental?
It was intentional. In my survey of other Apache project's bylaws, I was originally surprised to find some such as HTTP Components (http://hc.apache.org/bylaws.html ) that use majority votes for removing people. However, the question is whether a small minority should be able to drain a project's attention and energy.
For anyone who hasn't already seen it, there is an outstanding presentation on "Open Source Projects and Poisonous People" that was done by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. I'd highly recommend it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE. The presentation's central thesis is that a project's attention and energy are its most valuable resource. People that cause long emotional debates without contributing to the project are extremely destructive to the project and must occasionally be asked to leave.
Of course everyone hopes to avoid these cases, but the question is whether the project should have the mechanism to fix itself. I feel that it must.
-- Owen
