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In my opinion, Debian has the best open-source governance model out of all the projects without a BFDL. Because it basically emulates it by appointing a single

• AstralStorm 8y ago
  And yet they take in many of RedHat solutions and decisions... mostly due to lack of manpower for the alternatives I suppose. Design by committee is avoided by using designs of someone else.
  • kibwen 8y ago
    Every design either comes from one person, or it comes from a committee. A project like Python has long since scaled far beyond the capability of one person to feasibly design. The same is true of any other major (or minor) programming language. Vague anxiety about design-by-committee is always in vogue, but it doesn't do us any good.
  • simonh 8y ago
    And RedHat takes projecys ftom upstreams they don’t contribute to and bundle them in their systems. Sorry, but this is a particularly mean spirited attitude. The open source model has always been to share your work On one hand and selectively use others work yourself where it makes sense. That’s what opens source is for. It’s what it means. BSD is free to commit their resources to those areas where they feel they can offer value or meaningful differentiation, and they do so.
  • ThePhysicist 8y ago
    I think there's nothing wrong with re-using good solutions that others have worked out instead of building your own just for the sake of being different. That's the open-source idea even, no? Freely reuse and build upon the work of others, so that we don't have to reinvent things again and again.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      And yet open source is constantly reinventing the same things over and over again anyway. I think parent's complaint is that Debian's model has failed to produce good solutions of its own, and while that isn't necessarily a requirement, it does speak to potential limitations of the model
      • krn 8y ago
        > it does speak to potential limitations of the model The parent compared a group of volunteers with the largest open-source company in the world, which is a part S&P 500. No other Linux distribution has a comparable amount of resources. Even Canonical is following the RedHat's lead (systemd, Wayland, PulseAudio).
        • iosonofuturista 8y ago
          So by your logic, Microsoft and Apple make better OSes than Linux by several orders of magnitude.
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          • throwawaymath 8y ago
            In terms of out of the box stability and support? Yes, absolutely. The power and flexibility of Linux comes with the cost of a much lower floor for stability than proprietary operating systems. You can make a rock solid system using Linux, but that requires nontrivial effort and knowledge. I have yet to see an issue on my personal Windows and macOS machines that approached e.g. package management hell on Linux, in terms of complexity and frustration. For examples of what open source projects look like when they have the backing and resources of large companies, look at LLVM versus GCC, BoringSSL versus OpenSSL and CentOS versus Ubuntu. "Better" would be too broad a description, but if you qualify it to the narrow scope of stability, then yeah I think proprietary resources generally come out ahead. I also don't think that is a controversial observation.
  • belorn 8y ago
    Last time I was a debconf, one such decision was basically 20-30 interested people sitting in the room and the speaker says "We need more people if we want to maintain and develop X, or could switch over and use Y. What is the progress on packing Y?". It was a rather simplistic process by the developer who is doing the work and anyone interested that wanted to show up. Debian leadership rarely get involved in such decisions.
  • debiandev 8y ago
    > And yet they take in many of RedHat solutions and decisions Citation needed - that's simply not true.
• jancsika 8y ago
  I'm not sure your "virtual BDFL" works. If it did, a virtual BDFL would have been able to stop the whole systemd vote from happening, declare that systemd would be the default going forward, and require that some number of developers come forward to take maintainership of alternate init system if init decoupling were to be a requirement in Debian. And Debian depends on a human WoT anyway. So a reasonable amount of developers saying, "Ok, we'll make sure everything can work on multiple init systems going forward," would be enough. And if that turned out to be untenable, they could make a different decision down the road. But that couldn't have happened because it would have gone against the democratic spirit of Debian. Compare to what Linus did with the pull request for kdbus. He said he trusted his maintainer who did the request, but also pointed out the amount of work and problems that could come from maintaining it. Maintainers argued, but ultimately it was the maintainers who retained agency and who ultimately maintained a sense of trust among each other. Now imagine if instead there had been a vote of Linux users/foundation members/whatever to decide whether to include kdbus. Linux would have bled developers regardless of the outcome. Because that model of governance would have given them less agency to make decisions about the direction of the project.
  • krn 8y ago
    > I'm not sure your "virtual BDFL" works. My point was that a "virtual BDFL" works better than the "design by committee", not that it works better than a real BDFL. It doesn't. I completely agree with you.
• greglindahl 8y ago
  There are many horrors that can happen, and the issue which caused the current governance discussion for Python was not "design by committee".