MJ, OK, based people vouching on IRC that you weren't trying to start another flamewar, I'm going to answer the question I think is relevant rather than the direct questions you asked:
It's my opinion that the primary mission of SPI is to support & sustain existing open source efforts in the form of the member projects. This is the only mission which does not require public discussion and the one with which other initiatives cannot conflict. Since the addition of the associated projects, SPI is now a "federated" organization, that is one made up of discrete parts with varied interests. For any federated organization to stay together and thrive, any major decision needs to be endorsed by not only a majority of the membership but a consensus of the member organizations as well. Otherwise, you risk alienating an entire member organization because they "have no voice" and they will leave SPI. This is especially important right now, when the vast majority of SPI registered contributors are DDs. You may not be aware of this, but just last August I was told by several people that SPI was "consitutionally unable to support projects other than Debian" by several major OSS organizers. The associated project structure was meant to change that. If we start making major decisions of political direction based on simple majority rule, SPI will go back to being Debian-only because the other projects will leave. You, as well as a couple others, use the example of Software Patents as an "obvious good" which nobody could argue with. But things are not so clear-cut. For example, if one of our associated projects was recieving the majority of its funding from IBM, having SPI spend significant funds and publicity on opposing SW patents could cause that organization to become defunded and even cease to exist. So we need to check with *each* member organization before engaging in activities which will affect all of them. Therefore, it is my opinion that any argument that we do not need a consensus of member projects to engage in major external activities is really an argument that SPI shouldn't have associated projects at all. Clearer? -- --Josh Berkus Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Project Core Team www.postgresql.org (all opinions expressed are my own; I do not speak for the Project unless specifically noted.) _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.spi-inc.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/spi-general
