Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 17:22:22 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Commerical applications (was: Development and validation Message-ID: <1045.853896142@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 21 Jan 1997 17:47:47 MST." <199701220047.RAA20475@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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> It's not complex. I've described the process in abstract; it only > *looks* complex, it doesn't *act* complex. Hmmm. I remain skeptical, but for the purposes of argument... :-) > > Voters also don't write bills, they just vote on existing ones - who > > writes the bills and takes care of introducing them? What if no > > "bills" are generated - does the project just idle along or are people > > allowed to still make changes? What sorts of changes? > > All changes involving dissenting opinions. Again, the core team is > who you should be asking this question, since you are really asking > "how much control is the core team giving away?". I think you're working from a misperception. The core team doesn't spend its time sitting around rubbing its collective hands together and going "Mooohahahaha! POWER!" so it's not likely to consider this in terms of power loss so much as it is in terms of how much workload is generated. From that perspective, it's still an open question as to who's going to draft bills for the system and what happens if everybody decides that drafting bills is too much work and they'd prefer to simply argue in the existing mailing lists (and there are many oblique ways of arguing a point which make it easy to claim later that you weren't attempting to circumnavigate the vote system at all). But that doesn't even raise the biggest issue, which is: > Freddy Kruger (Kruger@ElmStreet.org) has submitted the > following policy topic for discussion: > > > FreeBSD should move from a.out to ELF. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > [ ... various amounts of discussion for 5 days ... ] Freddy raises the issue and 10 people vote on it, 7 feeling ELF-ish enough that the motion "passes." Now what? We've got this as a supposed piece of "FreeBSD Policy" now and users will surely expect it to be implemented or there wouldn't be much point in the policy or the vote, but who's going to do the work? The 7 voters? Does that mean that in order to vote "yes" you also have to be willing to do the work? I'd say most definitely yes to that since a vote without the rocks to back it up is rather worthless (Judge: "Have you reached a verdict?" "Yes, we the jury find the proposal good and would like someone to implement it." Judge: "Who?" Jury: "Uh, just someone. Hey, all you asked us to do was vote on it, remember?"). So now the question is, if it takes a committment to actually implement a proposal in order to vote, are people going to jump up and vote all that much? If it doesn't take a comittment, what's to stop the peanut gallery from using up their votes on things which will never get implemented since there are no actual volunteers committed to doing the work? And what about a No vote? Do you have to be willing to make a counter-proposal or somehow balance your "no" in a meaningful way or do the "no's" become stronger than "yesses" since it's a lot more easy now to shoot something down than vote for it and get stuck actually doing it. I don't know, I still think the exception cases outnumber the rules at this point, and with enough ambiguity still left over to choke a wooly mammoth. Jordan
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