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Date:      Tue, 4 Feb 2003 21:55:30 -0500
From:      Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>
To:        Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: dillon@'s commit bit: I object
Message-ID:  <20030205025530.GA17078@papagena.rockefeller.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20030205021134.GO12525@wantadilla.lemis.com>

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Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> This incident has generated enough traffic
> already.  I've counted a total of over 500 messages on this subject
> already, not including the stuff on slashdot.

Wow.  So -chat is minor stuff (around 100 on the topic so far).

<$0.02>
I think FreeBSD is not and should not be a democracy, and those
non-committers who want to direct the project or influence core's
decisions are unrealistic.  Those who make demands are worse than 
that.  

Perhaps the elements of democracy introduced in the last few years
have changed people's ideas of how it works: nobody would dream of
demanding things from Theo de Raadt, or Linus Torvalds, or claiming to
those people that just because they use his stuff on a daily basis
they have a right to tell him what to do (as opposed to offering
suggestions, which we all can do in a civil manner).  But somehow
people (on this list, at least) seem to think they can do that with
FreeBSD's core -- maybe because no single member of core is as
famous/notorious as the names I cited.

Committers can vote for core, and as a non-committer, I think that's
ample.  It's ridiculous to say a system administrator should have a
say in controlling the project's direction just because he uses
FreeBSD daily.  By that reckoning, I should be represented on my
toothbrush manufacturer's board.  I don't want to vote, and in
projects like this, I don't believe in excessive democracy.  Look at
Debian -- one of the most democratic projects around, development
moves at the speed of treacle.  By contrast, look at phoenix (the web
browser) -- they've closed their development process to a few
well-chosen insiders, and in a matter of months they've produced a
browser with the best features of Mozilla, with the same code base,
but vastly faster and leaner.  

FreeBSD's team is still doing a great job, on the whole.  If a
significant fraction of the other committers truly believe that dillon
was on balance a hindrance and not a help, they were right to remove
his commit bit.  I don't particularly care to know the inside story,
and I apologize for this thread (I didn't start it, but two of my
posts did get linked on Slashdot's front page, so I guess I can take
some of the blame).  Whether they could have done it more "nicely" I
don't know -- well, they tried to keep it quiet, which was nice of
them, and if it weren't for our pet troll they may have succeeded.
Since then, the statements they've made are well-mannered, and explain
things quite adequately as far as I'm concerned.  

Now lets get back to improving the system...

</$0.02>

- Rahul

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