Re: Draft of Proposal for the GNOME Foundation.

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 03:55:03PM -0400, Nat Friedman wrote:
> > I don't think we should allow any referendums other than recall of the
> > board.
> 
> What if the board unfairly decides to exclude a piece of software from
> a release?  A recall of the board at that point -- right before a
> release -- could be disasterous for the whole project (not that the
> kind of lack of unity/harmony required to reach this point isn't!).  A
> referendum to force the inclusion of the package would be a lot
> cleaner.

I think that's the exact point.  A recall is a much more drastic meassure
then voting on an issue.  And thus this would reserve referendum only for
cases where not recalling the board would be seen as more disasterous then
recalling it.

> > Requiring unanimous approval for anything is not good. Setting fixed
> > date limits is also not good, this should be up to the judgement of
> > the board and the release coordinators (what if we decided to have
> > releases 30 days apart)? Also writing stuff like this into the bylaws
> > might make trouble later. For example, if we wanted to drop a module
> > from the release, would that mean we'd have to delay is 60 days?
> 
> Yeah, but how do you do a release if the module maintainers aren't
> going to cooperate?

I don't think you need to make this official.  It just works this way.  If a
module maintainer refuses to cooperate then the board can drop him from the
release.  I think any official legal mumbo jumbo is going to change any of
this, thus I would just leave out this part.  It should be in the discretion
of the board to figure out how to do the release and how to get enough of the
maintainers "on board" to make the release happen.  No release will ever have
ALL the modules.  Thus just because a project is in GNOME doesn't mean the
maintainer should be able to stall a release of which he is not part of.

George

-- 
George <jirka@5z.com>
   Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, 
   but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
                       -- Winston Churchill