Spins

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 03:36:05PM -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> Having the Board or any other group decide conflicts on an ad-hoc
> basis doesn't scale.  I'd predict that would lead to an increasingly
> jerry-rigged final product that works more poorly for everyone.
> Setting direction and focus is what the Board was created to do.  It
> may not be possible for every single person to be 100% happy at the
> end of the process, but the goals (in order) should be to establish
> that direction, and then ensure that contributors have freedom to try
> things outside of it.  Where there is a conflict, the first goal has
> to win out, just as with our freedom principle for instance.
> 
I disagree with some of this. I think that it is exactly the mission of the
Board to decide conflicts on a somewhat ad-hoc (but not arbitrary) basis.
If the people who are doing the work set direction and focus, they are
delineating where they are going to take the people using their product.  If
people who are not doing the work set direction and focus, they are setting
forth limitations on what is possible.  Legal issues and clarifications of
how to apply free software principles to corner cases are areas where the
Board should be setting forth limitations.  Resolving conflicts between two
sets of contributors is also a limitation in that it tells the sides how
they must interact with each other to get back to business (this could be
telling one side they must give in to the other but hopefully the Board
members looking at the problem would be able to find a middle ground in
the specific problem).

As for my distinction between ad hoc and arbitrary -- I agree that the Board
should be resolving conflicts from general principles (thus, not arbitrary).
But the decisions should be made for actual problems that exist, not by
creating a vision by which your project can be judged when youdeviate from
it.  My issue with the target audience and Board created vision ideals are
that the Board is then making decisions based on how it affects the target
audience or whether it fits into the vision they (or a past Board) had for
Fedora.  Before reaching that point, I would argue that the Fedora Project
would be better served by addressing how the Board's decision maximises the
ability of the current contributors who are involved to do their work better.

-Toshio
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