Hi, > In a standard open source software project, authority is (roughly) a > meritocracy. Authority flows to those people who contribute and who > demonstrate themselves competent.
There's one group of people who like authority, and power, and they give themselves titles and do elections and votings and think up formal structures, like who gets to be a simple developer, or a developer 2nd grade with semi commit access, or a grande developer 1st grade with iron cross, or an admin, or whatever. They revel in hierarchies and power, or the illusion thereof. And there's those who do the work and who don't really care. Authority flows to those who like authority, and work flows to those who like work, and the two are sometimes the same, but not necessarily and not automatically. > This model works quite well. In some cases. > It seems like an obvious model for OSM to adopt, and it's the one I > _thought_ we were adopting. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you have only seen cases where your model "works quite well" and not those where it didn't. > Maybe the authority being exercised by the OSMF in working on the > licensing problem is an illusion. The OSMF has no authority over the project, only over the funds it allocates. It has no mandate from the project, and only a minority of project members are also foundation members. Look at you! All I'm saying is ditch those stupid votes where three and half people cast a vote and the rest don't care, and already you give me all that anarchist utopia bullshit. We're grown-up people, we can decide which tags to use without someone dictating a process to us, and what's best: We can change our minds tomorrow without some bureaucrat telling us that "a decision has been made" (your words!) and can only be changed through process X, yes and please fill out and sign three copies of the yellow form. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
