On 3/20/06, Al Eridani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 3/20/06, Craig McClanahan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > At Apache, committers are a self-selected meritocracy. > > That is a contradiction in terms (what is sometimes called an "oxymoron"). > I'll take your word that they are self-elected (honestly, I don't know). > Therefore, meritocracy is not involved, self-interest is. > > To be a meritocracy, more than the already elected committers would have > to participate in the election.
I'll be fascinated to watch you try to sell that approach to Apache at large :-). I don't think you'll get very far, though ... there is a lot of evidence that this kind of culture is pretty good at building successful software, on a large varieties of what you might mean by "successful". And *all* of the various project communities here work this way. > If you cannot > > convince existing committers that you belong, then you don't belong. > > Much better explanation, although I would replace "then you don't belong." > with "then they make sure you are not allowed in." to be more thruthful. Out of the 22 existing committers to Struts, 21 of them followed the "deal with it" pattern and got voted in (I got grandfathered solely because I started the thing). So did the thousands of people who have submitted bug reports, submitted patches, answered questions on the mailing list, proposed new code that got accepted, and sometimes got themselves nominated to be committers. That's the way Apache projects work. If you don't like it, you're free to run your own project, anywhere else you like, according to whatever rules you see fit. As for Apache in general (and the Struts project in particular) we're quite comfortable with the rules as they are. On the other hand, if you want to materially influence the direction of an Apache project, this is the reality you need to base your actions in. > Deal with it. Or go away. > > Almost a perfect exposition of your attitude. My only quibble is that the > only > way to "deal with it" is to "go away", so the "Or" implies a false > dichotomy. See above for evidence that an alternative really does exist. Craig
