Re: when companies join over free software projects

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Mark Galassi wrote:

> I think a better response in that situation would have been for Miguel
> to put on his GNOME project leader hat, and say "you should not make
> releases without coordinating with the maintainer".  As an example on
> the docbook-tools list, Dave Mason, the Red Hat labs manager, always
> tells people that they should not make splinter releases out of
> impatience, but rather they should coordinate with me since I am the
> maintainer.

I think Miguel has done an incredible job leading the GNOME project and
will always be a key person in the GNOME community (witness: the awesome
job he did at the press event this week) but I think being co-founder of
a GNOME company is inherently a huge conflict with his role as leader of
the GNOME project.  In my opinion, this is probably the most important
reason for the creation of the GNOME Foundation: since Miguel has such a
huge stake in a GNOME company, we have to move away from the Linus
governance model, towards a team governance model, a la, Apache.

Cheers,

Bart