Re: Quo vadis, GNOME? (was: Getting Bugzilla support into Bug-buddy)

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> 
> Also, the foundation has run into the problem/blessing of maintainer
> authority. The foundation can't tell maintainers what to do, and many
> maintainers work at companies. Any maintainer who isn't feeling
> cooperative - perhaps encouraged by their affiliation - can refuse to
> cooperate with community plans. I don't think we have a good way
> around that issue. If people aren't playing in good faith, they just
> screw the project. I don't have a suggestion for fixing this; I'm not
> prepared to say "the board should be able to override maintainers"
> because that's a whole different can of worms.

Actually, according to the charter, the Board has the power to define
what is GNOME, and therefore effectively the power to sanction a fork
of a module as the official GNOME version. Obviously this is a power
of last resort and one I hope the board never has to use.

Beyond this, we are starting to set policies that a package must
follow to make it into a particular GNOME release. While I don't think
the threat of leaving a package out is very realistic, I think it's
good that we are setting these policies for things like licensing,
platform compatibility, bug tracking, and so on.

 - Maciej