Samuel Thibault writes:
> Yes, it means that people have to follow what was decided. That's also
> what a community is about.
>
>> and they broke off and forked over distros
>
> Yes, that's unfortunate, but that can't be helped with. Different goals,
> thus different projects.
Exactly. Their goals weren't approved according to the structure of the
project, they didn't like the result, and so they left (well, some did,
others I hope stayed on and adapted). Nobody saw it as their
responsibility to subvert the project to impose their goals.
> Linus gives a lot of delegation. In the end he is the last merge point,
> but he completely trusts direct subtree maintainers, who can work the
> way they wish.
As does Richard. He largely only retains responsibility for
project-wide decisions while the rest is delegated. In the overwhelming
majority of cases he lets the maintainers, webmasters, etc. do their
jobs independently. Many of the email exchanges I have with him end up
with "DTRT" ("do the right thing", meaning, use my judgment). He very,
very rarely intervenes in the development of individual packages (other
than Emacs, of course).
--
-brandon
