Peter Jeremy wrote: > On 2009-Jul-30 09:47:11 -0700, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> "Lance Davis, the main project administrator for CentOS, a popular free >> 'rebuild' of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, appears to have gone AWOL. > > (He has since resurfaced and CentOS appears to be back to business as > usual). > > As an alternative scenario, consider TWiki - an "open source" wiki > created/founded by Peter Theony in 1998. By 2008, it had built up > a significant community of developers and was reasonably widely used. > Peter Theony suddenly changed the rules and license and locked out > existing developers who refused to agree to the new rules. See > http://foswiki.org/About/WhyThisFork for more details.
Conflicts on open-source projects are not that uncommon. One does not have to look too hard in Sage to find developers of software X not exactly bosom buddies with developers of software Y. It's a shame really, but that seems to be a fact of life. I was involved in a conflict myself over some open-source software. But ultimately, Sage is released under GPL 2. If I, or anyone else did not like any rules William wanted to stick on Sage, I could simply say "Stuff you William, I have the source, it is GPL and I'm going to create my own fork." If I believed such a thing was likely, I would not waste my time doing development on Sage. But conversely if it did happen, I would not feel cheated in any way. I know exactly what I'm doing when volunteering to work on Sage development. >> Anyway, I would appreciate people sharing their thoughts about how to make >> the Sage project more organized with respect to key people vanishing -- >> either temporarily or permantly -- from the project. If you have relevant >> experience with other projects, or no of good articles about this sort of >> thing, etc., please share. > > The approach used by FreeBSD is for most functions to be handled by > teams, rather than individuals: The overall direction of the Project > is managed by the core team - 9 people elected by and from the > committers (people with write access to the FreeBSD source repository). > Release engineering is another team (mostly self-selected). The > Project's assets (trademark, domain name etc) are held by the FreeBSD > Foundation - a not-for-profit legal entity that can accept donations > and fund development and advocacy. I think Apache is like that. It seems to work well - Apache has been a very successful project. I doubt they are without their disputes though. > Also, a recent thread suggests that there are confidential agreements > in place between the Sage Project (presumably represented by William > Stein) and some Sage users. There needs to be some mechanism in place > to ensure that the content of those agreements can be accessed by > William's successor in the event of William's departure. You do raise an interesting question. I assume many would be convered by agreements in the university though. I personally don't have a big problem with any of this. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
