Hi, On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 14:36 -0700, Kris Craig wrote:
> > Slightly provocative: Why should I be forced to maintain code by > people who > > don't want to maintain it themselves? > > Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You choose to contribute to PHP > in the manner in which you do, just as other people choose to > contribute in different, sometimes less obvious, ways. Right, nobody can truely enforce me doing something, still I gave some form of promise/commitment to less so since 5.3 reached EOL but still this might require me to do something. > Probably even due to votes by people > > about whom I don't know anything? Mind that most maintenance work by > > most contributors happens in free time on a voluntarily base. > > > > And no open source doesn't mean democracy as governing model. > > It can. Every project is governed differently. Well democracy can mean so many things - in ancient Greece, the origin of democracy, only the men of a social group had a vote. Even in Switzerland, which is famous for its direct democracy, women weren't allowed to vote till 1971 (in the canton Appenzell Innerrhoden even only till 1990 for municipal issues) in others the voting power is unequally distributed (see i.e. the EU parliament where larger countries have less MEPs than smaller ones and different voting system's in different countries give different weight to citizens of different countries) Anyways this is a way different debate. > Winston Churchill once famously said that democracy is the worst form > of government, except all the others that have been tried. While this depends on your view on what is good - Louis XIV of France was quite happy with his, I assume. But government of a society is different from governance of a software project. One case leads to a revolution, the other to a fork. > The > > democratic part is that people who don't like it can fork the > project and > > eventually receive a higher traction. > > And then we can have dozens of competing PHP codebases floating > around. That's were the social aspect comes back in - even people without a formal vote have ability to impact the project. > The problem with that model is that history has consistently shown > that those in power may listen, but will ultimately just do what they > want, anyway. If those with power will "ultimately just do what they want, anyway" the official form of governance doesn't matter at all. Thanks for agreeing to that :-D But as this went to a path through European history let me reiterate and clarify what I said in a different post in this thread: The strict dependence on a vote impacts the constructive feedback for proposers negatively. It also provides no feedbackloop for leading to constructive critic being ignored, it becomes less clear whether voters were aware of that. It also makes simple contributions hard, adding quite some transactional cost for small improvements by newcomers. (then again here is no clear and objective measure what "small" includes) This is demotivating for all sides. The approach I have in mind is going back to a consensus model by default, allowing truly everybody to participate and giving the opportunity to call for a vote if consensus can't be reached. Given our social diversity I however think that this hardly works out as there always will be somebody calling for a vote ... obvious consequence would be a quorum for calling for a vote .. wich ends up in even more bureaucracy hell. > > I feel it's also worth reminding everyone that VCS accounts generally > aren't given away like candy. Most people who have that access have > done something or another to earn it. It depends on the time of day and position of the stars, sometimes they are thrown on people unless they run really fast, sometimes nobody looks after requests ... :) johannes > -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
