On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 9:41 AM Pierre <pierre-...@processus.org> wrote:
> - For once, I'm writing PHP since PHP 3, and doing it professionally > for more than 15 years, I wrote PHP code 8+ hours a day for the latest > 15 years (more or less), I'm one of the many silent users for which each > language feature change will impact every-day's life. Maintaining open > source community driven tools doesn't make their writers fundamentally > better than the rest of us in programming, it just make them visible. > I use php every day, I have been doing so for close to 10 years now. Language features also impact my daily life, and I'm glad they do. The software Tobias writes also has a big impact on my daily life, just like PHP as I depend on a lot of his packages. Voting rights doesn't make someone a better developer, and applying for them for this reason makes no sense to me. Working with this many packages in the PHP ecosystem means that one (hopefully) has a lot of experience in a lot of parts of open-source software. In fact, open-source package maintainers are often one of the first lines when it comes to PHP compatibility. They ensure your software keeps working because they keep their packages up-to-date. Every minor change in PHP can cascade into having to update hundreds of packages. Every choice made can seem good for certain use-cases, and then completely fall apart when someone with this much experience brings a good argument to the table. - All those daily silent users doesn't always agree with community > packages standards, style, design and direction, and that's legit, thus > community maintainers cannot represent all the daily users. Regarding a > community package, no matter how much it relies on community or users > and feedback, will always see its final decisions under the hand of a > few, which may not be representative (and for the best, since that the > maintainer will have to maintain it, it's only legit to let him/her them > decide). > They cannot and do not represent all the daily users. At best they decide that a certain standard is worth keeping and (hopefully) ensure things like consistency through the ecosystem. This can be seen through composer and PSR autoloading for example. > - Proprietary code represents much more code in the end that > open-source, most of us write proprietary all day long, at least as much > code as we re-use community code. > A vast majority of proprietary code depends on open-source community written by the community. --- I think that people who have a big impact on the ecosystem should be able to vote. Perhaps it would be an idea for other voters to vote on whether or not others can receive voting rights? When someone contributes a lot of (free) time to the ecosystem and makes a big impact, I think it's unfair to ask for even more (free) time to make a direct contribution to PHP just to get voting permissions, it feels like this is just for show.
