On Monday, January 02, 2012 09:10:08 AM Greg Freemyer wrote: ...
My belief is we have a defacto steering committee. If so, simply documenting the current steering process adds transparency but adds no delays.
It is obvious that steering power exists, although it doesn't show stability, nor complete transparency. Here is my two cents about how it works, and why adding committee is pointless. Release and platform managers are people that we see and they have power to accept or reject software which as end effect will influence distro direction. They both are directly responsible to their company, and indirectly, over the company, to the community. They are also not top execs, so they have to respect general direction those above give. This part is not and never will be transparent as competition would like. We can see many SUSE employees giving their opinions in communication media dedicated to community. They have steering power as they are specialists for subsystems and managers will ask them for recommendation in any non-trivial case. Status and activity of upstream projects has steering power, specially of large, complex subsystems. There is no distro that can steer kernel, Xorg, KDE, Gnome, direction as that would mean it has to create branch and take care of the development and maintenance. That is not going to happen. Even smaller projects have power to steer distro direction if they are unique and important. Active part of community that maintains or brings add on value in a distro and supporting service is one of steering powers. Company will not try to upset them as it will mean giving up on added values or hiring replacement. Passive part of community has some power to steer direction by expressing their opinion, although that is just as much as any source of feedback and ideas can influence things in a real world. The best ideas may be intriguing enough for someone to abandon their current activity and take a shot on a new idea, but in general only ideas and no motion will result in no change. After all above, I'm sure that some steering committee, (board, commission: name it to your liking) will not change landscape unless it controls manpower able to take over existing tasks. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org