Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 09:38:38PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 07:52:55PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 05:16:14PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> >On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 01:11:47PM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> >> The way things are now "works" because of status quo.  We tell anybody
>> >> who wants to change status quo to go start a fork and do it there.
>> >>
>> >Wait... The entire list of times I can remember someone being encouraged to
>> >take their contributions elsewhere are:
>> >
>> >1) Kernel modules
>> >2) Non-free software
>> >3) Free software with legal issues
>> >4) I think something to do with packaging content may have resulted in
>> >   something but I don't know anything about the outcome there.
>> >
>> >Who's been told to fork Fedora because of the status-quo-target-audience?
>> 
>> Not in so many words, but the whole Zope/Plone fiasco from a few releases
>> ago seems a prime example here.  Fedora moved on with python, and we didn't
>> allow a compat-python package for Zope and Plone to continue working.  The
>> reasons were varied, but they boiled down to python being a framework and
>> having two frameworks providing almost identical things was not deemed to
>> be something Fedora was going to do [1].
>> 
>Once again, not a target audience decision.  We didn't say, "Fedora is not
>for web developers, therefore we don't care enough to support zope and
>plone".  We said, the python maintainer thinks that supporting multiple
>python stacks is infeasible therefore we aren't going to support this.  It
>was a contributor and technical decision.  Not a target-audience decision.

It is.  It's one step removed.  There were people actively wanting to make
Zope/Plone work via a compat-python stack.  It went all the way to FESCo
and got voted down.  The zope/plone users were the target audience there.
There were people willing to do the work, all they needed was a yes from
FESCo.  We told them no.  As Jesse has mentioned, 'status quo' won out.

>> Those are the kinds of headaches Bill is talking about.
>>
>And I agree there are headaches there.  But I think if something is valuable
>enough to a contributor, they'll step up to solve the headaches if they're
>requisites to being able to fulfill their vision.  Instead of forbidding
>things we should be identifying the headaches and allowing them 

Not sure if you truncated that last sentence, but this whole paragraph
sounds counter to your one above.

>After all, everything we do now is one big headache.  Yet we have
>contributors willing to deal with every aspect of that.

Everything we do is a big headache?  I'm prone to hyperbole myself,
but that's a bit over the top.  If everything was a headache, nobody
would volunteer for it.

josh