Jeff Law wrote: > egcs was about growing the developer community and moving away from a > single gating maintainer. > > The steering committee was formed to deal with political issues, which > after the gcc/egcs reintegration includes most of the FSF interaction. > Ideally the steering committee would not need to exist, but reality is > unfortunately different.
And if anyone is under the illusion that the SC is a powerful Politburo, sometimes it feels more like the Congress of People's Deputies (the powerless Soviet parliament which, on paper, governed the country). On technical issues we mostly rubber-stamp what the RM and his team want to do, or just let the maintainers fight it out on this list, and on legal issues, while we try to persuade RMS to move a certain way, in the end the FSF is the legal owner of the code and has the real power. The SC has the power to appoint maintainers, but we're rarely in the position of having more qualified volunteers than positions available, so the decision is usually fairly automatic. The result is that often (though not lately), two weeks go by without a single message on the SC mailing list. The secret about SC deliberations is just how few deliberations there are. When there is traffic, the SC gets to spend time arguing with RMS. Oh, joy.