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What free or open source projects have had good governance? The motivation for neovim being forked was a frustration with having a vim PR rejected over fear th

What free or open source projects have had good governance? The motivation for neovim being forked was a frustration with having a vim PR rejected over fear that something would break. The last few years neovim and vim have competed. 'BDFL' I'd most associate with Python, where Guido van Rossum recently stepped down from the role IIRC.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
There are quite a few healthy and longing projects; decades in some cases. You can't do that without good governance. Of course sometimes that governance comes in the form of a benevolent dictator workaholic running the whole show. Nothing wrong with that as long as it works. E.g. Linus Torvalds might not be the nicest person to deal with, but he sure gets a lot of people to contribute very meaningful changes to Linux continuously. I'd say he's an extremely effective manager of what is arguably one of the fastest evolving bits of software on this planet with a sustained modification rate of many tens of thousands of lines of code every month for decades. So, I would call that good governance. Other projects do less well because of governance issues and inter personal issues. Not going to name names here; we all know examples of such projects. My observation is that ideology, dogmatism can get in the way of good governance. There's a lot of OSS software that gets written and sponsored by corporations. You tend to see a lot more pragmatic attitude in projects like that. People working on those projects are getting paid to do so and are expected to do so competently, solve technical problems, and generally do things that have business value. Conflicts can happen in any project but when the conflicts are of an ideological nature, there isn't a pragmatic way of resolving those issues. Pragmatism and ideology simply don't mix. At best you can agree to disagree, which is the pragmatic thing to do.
adultSwim 4y ago
Debian has been a great example of open transparent governance over technical infrastructure

jillesvangurp 4y ago

There are quite a few healthy and longing projects; decades in some cases. You can't do that without good governance. Of course sometimes that governance comes in the form of a benevolent dictator workaholic running the whole show. Nothing wrong with that as long as it works. E.g. Linus Torvalds might not be the nicest person to deal with, but he sure gets a lot of people to contribute very meaningful changes to Linux continuously. I'd say he's an extremely effective manager of what is arguably one of the fastest evolving bits of software on this planet with a sustained modification rate of many tens of thousands of lines of code every month for decades. So, I would call that good governance. Other projects do less well because of governance issues and inter personal issues. Not going to name names here; we all know examples of such projects. My observation is that ideology, dogmatism can get in the way of good governance. There's a lot of OSS software that gets written and sponsored by corporations. You tend to see a lot more pragmatic attitude in projects like that. People working on those projects are getting paid to do so and are expected to do so competently, solve technical problems, and generally do things that have business value. Conflicts can happen in any project but when the conflicts are of an ideological nature, there isn't a pragmatic way of resolving those issues. Pragmatism and ideology simply don't mix. At best you can agree to disagree, which is the pragmatic thing to do.

adultSwim 4y ago

Debian has been a great example of open transparent governance over technical infrastructure