A recent thread on legal-discuss drifted off into a discussion of a project pathology that some thought was part of the historical record of the Maven project.
As a fairly recent addition to the Maven PMC, I've been trying to get some historical sense of the project so as to better understand the situation it finds itself in. My uncomfortable conclusion is that the Maven TLP exhibited a number of fairly severe problems over a long period of time. The trademark enforcement issue which finally led to board intervention was a mote in the eye compared to some of the earlier beams. This leads me to wonder about supervision in the Foundation. PMC members are responsible for supervision of their project. However, I submit that there are some limitations to this. The PMC is the community. If the community get peculiar, the PMC is as likely as not to be part and parcel of the overall drift. Pick your metaphor: the boiled frog, the Stockholm Syndrome, whatever. The board is responsible for supervising the projects, but I felt that it would be kinder and more productive to try to start a conversation here about if or how the Foundation could improve project supervision and see if it resulted in a coherent proposal to the board, rather than start another noisy thread on the board list. To support my observation above about the Maven project, I'll cite two things that seemed to have been true long before a company was founded around one vision of commercialization of Maven: a BdFL and the extensive use of code outside the Foundation to shortcut (or, perhaps more accurately, circumvent) community supervision. I have not gone so far as to spelunk archives to see if there is any evidence that the board was conscious and concerned about these issues over their long lifetime.
