Re: Questions for candidates

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

Whenever a free software project becomes large, we divide it into various
parts that are worked on by different people.  That is the only way to get
the job done, but it creates an opening for a problem to happen: the
maintainers of various parts tend to focus on the improvement of their
individual parts, and even the popularity of their individual parts, rather
than on the overall goal.  This often leads to get conflicts between the
parts.

This occurs at the level of the whole GNU Project--for example, GNOME's
default bindings define Meta-TAB which gets in the way of using Emacs.
There is potential for this to happen within GNOME as well.

To maintain its unity, the larger project needs to have a way of persuading
the maintainers of various parts, when necessary, to turn their attention
to the needs of the whole.

There are many possible ways to do this, but the first step (which may be
sufficient) is to define the maintainers' mission as taking a
responsibility in developing the larger project.  In other words, we should
not encourage the idea that they, as coders, are autonomous and in charge
of their domains.  That would encourage the tendency towards fragmentation.