Re: Discussing issues

[Egbert Eich <eich@XFree86.Org>]

Havoc Pennington writes:
 > On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 07:29:21PM +0200, Egbert Eich wrote: 
 > > Well, Carl, I can only give my personal views on this:
 > > The 'governance matter' has recieved way too much attention.
 > > Havoc has already stated that in 99% of the cases things can
 > > get worked out collectively. So why even bother?
 > 
 > The argument is to find some way to avoid the situation we're
 > currently in. The 1% is 1% of decisions, but can be enormously time
 > consuming if you don't have a way to resolve them.

Right. But this is open source. Flamewars are just part of it.
Most of us are driven by ego, so we have to be allowed to express
our opinions and fight for them.

 > 
 > However, I agree with you the word "governance" should be dropped as
 > it seems to be pretty distracting.
 > 
 > What I would ask is simply how are we going to get a healthy X
 > development community that meets the needs of most people/groups,
 > ships stable releases, and includes new features and innovations.
 > Maybe multiple organizations are involved here, but which are they,
 > and what is the scope of each, and how do they relate.
 > 
 > One aspect of this that hasn't been mentioned is simply ensuring that
 > there's regular discussion of big picture goals and organization. It

Yes, but let us start small first.

 > seems like a lot of this conflict comes from some people assuming
 > XFree86 was more or less a porting project, and others assuming it was
 > "the" X project including driving new features.
 > 
 > If we all just go code now, instead of resolving things for real, then
 > sooner or later, or maybe even every month or so, all this comes back
 > and bites us again. If we're lucky then the darwinian celebrity death
 > match between projects eventually picks a winner, but really, what is
 > the point of that exercise.

We are slowly starting to understand each others issues. If we are
trying to find a solution to all these questions I'm afraid we will
continue to talk for another month or so without finding a real
solution.
We are about to create a new collaboration, so like any new projects
we cannot resolve all issues at once. Once we have built up trust
and understanding for each other's ideas/goals/problems we can resolve
matters as they come by.
Open source projects have flamewars from time to time. That's part
of the culture. XFree86 didn't have flamewars for a long time, that
probably was a bad sign. Trying to avoid flamewars by trying to 
device a mechanism to make decisions is unhealthy.


Egbert.
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